Freecell Solver 3.10.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 3.10.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

This release fixes two bugs - one with the --max-iters affecting only the last instance, and one with reading foundations with 0, and implements many small optimisations and cleanups. It also adds some experimental code with the so-called delta-states, where states are compactly encoded based on the original state. This functionality is not available in the main solver yet, but it powers the experimental on-disk-key/value-databases-based solver, which end up not scaling very well during testing.

Enjoy!

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!

Freecell Solver 3.4.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 3.4.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

In this release, we've added the --set-pruning flag to turn on the Horne's play prune, which improves performance. There are two new presets - -l enlightened-ostrich (or -l eo for short), which makes use of --set-pruning and is the fastest preset yet, and -l maliciously-obscure (-l mo) which is slow but generates especially short solutions.

We added a compile-time option to use RCS-like states storage which conserves a lot of RAM and allowed Freecell Solver to scale to over 200 million positions on an x86-64 machine with 64 GB of RAM (which was utilised for that courtesy of Amadiro's university). There are many other major and minor speed and memory optimisations in this release.

The --ms and -M flags were added to the make_pysol_freecell_board.py program, to generate Microsoft deals even for numbers higher than 32,000, which are different in PySol and PySolFC. Furthermore, the CMake configuration was updated to use "lib${LIB_SUFFIX}", so it can be built on some 64-bit systems.

Finally, there's an experimental --trim-max-stored-states which currently may crash the solver, but we decided to release it despite this fact.

All of these changes prove to be a huge step forward for Freecell Solver making this release its best release yet.