Freecell Solver 3.18.0 was Released: JavaScript port

Freecell Solver version 3.18.0, has been released. Freecell Solver 3.18.0 is available in the form of a source archive, from the download page. Freecell Solver is an open source framework (library and some command line applications), for automatically solving several variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

The highlights of this version are the new port to JavaScript, courtesy of the wonderful emscripten compiler from LLVM to JavaScript, that allows Freecell Solver to run inside modern browsers, as well as the fact that the test suite and the relevant now work on 32-bit systems (previously they only worked on 64-bit ones).

Enjoy!

Freecell Solver 3.16.0 was Released + New Screencast

Freecell Solver version 3.16.0, has been released. Freecell Solver 3.16.0 is available in the form of a source archive, from the download page. Freecell Solver is an open source framework (library and some command line applications), for automatically solving several variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

This new release took about a month to prepare, and also contains less profound changes than the previous release, but still quite a lot to look for. It features the -l micro-finance-improved and -l qualified-seed presets, which improve upon the average solution length (at the expense of speed). The --flares-choice flag was added and one can specify --flares-choice fcpro to choose based on the length of the Freecell Pro moves. Another additional flag is --flares-iters-factor which multiplies the time the flares run at by a factor for a speed/solution-length trade-off.

Finally, the individual flares are now recycled and their memory is reused when they are no longer needed which yields a RAM optimisation in certain cases.

More information about all these can be found in the distributed documents of Freecell Solver.

In addition to all that, a new screencast of PySolFC solving Freecell using Freecell Solver is now available on YouTube. Make sure you expand the details for all the credits of the software and other material that was used for its creation.

Enjoy and happy holidays.

Freecell Solver 3.14.1 was Released

Freecell Solver version 3.14.0, shortly followed by Freecell Solver 3.14.1, which fixed a build problem on Microsoft Windows, have been released. Freecell Solver 3.14.1 is available in the form of a source archive, and a Win32 self-installing executable, from the download page. Freecell Solver is an open source framework (library and some command line applications), for automatically solving several variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

This release features several new features: we added a 6th Best-First-Search weight of the inverse of the number of cards not above parents, which has proven useful. We now also allow test groups inside the --tests-order and --depth-tests-order with the random-dfs scan to be ordered using the function =asw(…) based on those BeFS weights.

As a result, the preset -l amateur-star or -l as for short has been added, that uses that and is our fastest preset yet. Another new preset is -l micro-finance (or -l mf for short), which yields especially short solutions.

There are also some not-as-major features: input boards can now contain a leading colon (":") at the beginning of the line of columns, so they can be copy-and-pasted directly from the output of fc-solve with the -p flag. The dbm_fc_solver and depth_dbm_fc_solver now store the positions more compactly (which aided in researching two-freecell deals), and the core libfreecell-solver code was made more 64-bit enabled and many of the limits were converted to 64-bit friendly ones.

A final note: we have dropped support for building Freecell Solver with Microsoft Visual C++ and other non-GCC compatible compilers, which do not support the newer C standards, and other useful features of GCC. Building Freecell Solver with GCC, clang and other compatible compilers will be continued to be supported on Microsoft Windows as well as on Linux and other UNIX-like systems.

More information about all these can be found in the distributed documents of Freecell Solver.

Enjoy!