01-April-2010: Freecell Solver Enterprises™, Inc., on behalf of the Freecell Solver™ development team, is glad to announce the upcoming availability of Freecell Solver™ Enterprise Edition. In its Enterprise Edition, Freecell Solver™ will be enhanced to solve generalised Freecell, in which there can be an arbitrary number of card ranks. Since generalised Freecell is NP-complete. This will allow us to use Freecell Solver™'s ingenious, cutting-edge algorithms to solve the previously hard, provably NP-Complete problems of the Travelling Salesman problem, Subset sum, Sudoku and Enterprise content management.
Since we expect some of our customers to wish to solve NP-complete problems
with data sets of an order larger than the standard computer word (32-bit or
64-bit), we are going to start using
the "GNU MP Bignum Library" (GMP). As our
CTO, Ron Johnson, says By making use of Freecell Solver™ Enterprise
Edition's sophisticated algorithms, we expect a cluster of 2,000 32-way
high-performance supercomputers to solve a 17,179,869,184 (2 to the power of 34)
problem, a short time before the heat death of the universe.
That's not the only change expected in Freecell Solver™ Enterprise Edition.
Until now Freecell Solver™ was written in ANSI C and was dependent only on
the standard C library. To make it more enterprise ready, we decided to convert
to such enterprise-ready languages as C++ and Java, and to utilise such
enterprise-ready
Cross-Platform
Abstraction Libraries such as Boost, Qt, glib, Apache's Portable
Runtime (APR), or ACE. Our CTO continues: Phil Greenspun
said
that “Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc,
informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of
Common Lisp.”. Well, now Freecell Solver™ will contain an
ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden and slow, but
enterprise ready, implementation of half of Common Lisp. This
is really very exciting.
We don't know yet which of these libraries
we are going to use, but we are likely to use more than one based on the
enterprise-readiness of their individual components.
Naturally, as the company behind Freecell Solver™ Enterprise Edition, Freecell Solver Enterprises™ does not expect to keep Freecell Solver™'s original permissive licence, the MIT/X11 License, because code which is licensed under it is easy to abuse, misuse, and generally use. Instead, the core Freecell Solver™ Enterprise Edition functionality would be available under the Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3, while making some extended functionality available only under own own custom, proprietary licence - exclusively for paying customers. We are really excited about this change which will allow use to protect our intellectual property from people and enterprises who will abuse, misuse or generally just use it.
Here is what others say about that:
-
Don Knuth:
Freecell Solver™ Enterprise Edition really excites me. I didn't think I'll see the day to see an Enterprise-ready NP-complete solver, but Freecell Solver™ EE made it happen. I can't wait to play with it.
-
Larry Wall:
Freecell Solver™ Enterprise Edition is the epitome of Laziness and Hubris, but unfortunately requires a lot of Patience.
-
Bill and Ted:
Enterprise Content Management! Yeah!!! Star Trek is Excellent, bro. Excellent!!! So where's Captain Kirk?
-
Shlomi Fish (the original creator of Freecell Solver):
Eh, what the hell?
As you can see, everybody are united in their opinion that Freecell Solver™ Enterprise Edition is the best thing since Enterprise bread came sliced by and for enterprises.
One can download the Freecell Solver™ Enterprise Edition version 1.0.0 source tarball, and after resolving all the essential dependencies and building it (as documented in the INSTALL file), type ./fc-solve --help-enterprise to get help for the enterprise features.
Very exciting! Where can I buy it?
ReplyDeleteNP is solved!
ReplyDeleteTuring prize is coming to you. Can I get a copy of source code
@szabgab.com: in case you wish to upgrade from the gratis version, please send a wire transfer to Freecell solver™ enterprises for 1.2 MUSD per copy, while giving the exact specifications of the desired deployment environment, as the premium version of Freecell Solver™ Enterprise Edition is not portable.
ReplyDeleteAlternatively, you can always donate to Shlomi Fish by PayPal for the improvement of the non-Enterprise-Edition (and non-"™") Freecell Solver, which is competing with Freecell Solver™ Enterprise Edition. (You can also donate for any other purpose). Note that Freecell Solver Enterprises™ would recommend against using Fish's solver due to its complete and utter lack of Enterprise readiness, but it's an option, should you choose to risk it.
@luolei: not only are Freecell Solver Enterprises™ going to win the Turing prize, we are also going to win the 1 Million U.S. Dollars Millenium Prize for proving that P-NP. Of course, all of this will be a drop in the ocean in comparison to the revenues from the licensing fees for Freecell Solver™ Enterprise Edition (see what I said to szabgab).
ReplyDeleteRegarding the source code - despite the fact that it is available under the open-source AGPL licence, it is an important trade secret which we will never reveal under any circumstances. If you must look at it (and risk "Cease and Decease" litigation) go to
the Freecell Solver homepage.
great April fool :)
ReplyDelete@Fabrice: thanks. :-)
ReplyDelete