Sunday, July 3, 2011

Freecell Solver 3.8.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 3.8.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

This release fixes some crashes using --trim-max-stored-states, adds a more meaningful man page instead of the token one that was previously present, adds scripts/parallel-range-solver-total to solve a range of deals in parallel by splitting them into chunks, and many smaller improvements and fixes.

We also forgot to mention the 3.6.0 release, which fixed the installation of fcs_dllexport.h, added the --tracemem compile time option, added a bug fix for incrementally increasing the iterations/stored-states limits, added a built-in version of kazlib's balanced binary search tree as a possible back-end for storage, and had some other improvements.

Enjoy!

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Freecell Solver™ Goes Webscale

1 April, 2011, Tel Aviv, Israel: Freecell Solver Enterprises™, Inc., on behalf of the Freecell Solver™ development team, is glad to announce the upcoming availability of the Webscale™ Edition of Freecell Solver™, the solver for various types of Patience games.

Freecell Solver™, has until now made use of a compile-time choice of primitive, in-memory, data-structures such as hash tables or self-balancing binary trees, but now we decided that it's time to move on to something more in the spirit of 2010s. Since SQL databases have already become passé, we decided to skip directly to the NoSQL trend of databases (also known as "Oh no! No SQL!") and to write alternative backends for Freecell Solver™ for distributed NoSQL stores such as Cassandra, MongoDB, or CouchDB.

Freecell Solver Enterprises™ is certain that using these modern, high-performance, and highly distributed stores will increase Freecell Solver™'s webscalability, and allow it to process a larger amount of stored positions than it could at the moment at a far greater speed and make Freecell Solver™ be ready for the cloud. As our CTO, Shlomi Fish, says “If you're not excited about it now, you should be.”

Expect the upcoming availability of Freecell Solver™ Webscale™ Edition from the homepage of Freecell Solver™.