New Freecell Solver version: 6.10.0

Freecell Solver is an open source library and some command line applications, for automatically solving several variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

There is a new release of the solver, version 6.10.0 with more details available in NEWS file.

Among the highlights are some code cleanups, some fixes, and some new features. Furthermore, Games-Solitaire-Verify was enhanced to verify solutions of some other solitaire variants, and there are a deal finder and a moves expander web pages.

Share and enjoy!

New Freecell Solver version: 5.22.0

Freecell Solver is an open source library and some command line applications, for automatically solving several variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

There is a new release of the solver (version 5.22.0) with more details available in NEWS file. Among the highlights are cleanups, fixes, and some new features.

In addition, we are proud to announce that our attempt at classifying as many zero freecells' deals as possible, as winnable or impossible to solve, has recently gone below 300,000 remaining unknown / intractable deals.

Share and enjoy!

New Freecell Solver version: 5.16.0

Freecell Solver is an open source library and some command line applications, for automatically solving several variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

There is a new release of the solver (version 5.16.0) with more details available in NEWS file. Among the highlights are the unbundling of the rinutils library, generating .msi installers using WiX, and some refactoring and optimisation.

Share and enjoy!

Graphical and Animated Display for the Online Freecell Solver

We are happy to announce that the online web-based Freecell solver now has a graphical and animated solution display, thanks to the open source version of Solitairey. The older text-based solution display is still available.

Freecell Solver is an open source library and some command line applications, for automatically solving several variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

Also of note is the new releases of the solver (up to version 5.6.0) with more details available in NEWS file, and some progress in compactly storing Freecell positions/states, going below the 64-bits threshold.

Share and enjoy!

Freecell Solver 5.0.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 5.0.0, has been released. It is available in the form of a source archive, Windows 32-bit and 64-bit binaries, and a live online version (which requires JavaScript, and is compatible with most modern browsers, including those for mobile devices) from the download page. Freecell Solver is an open source library and some command line applications, for automatically solving several variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

The new release puts the headers under a #include <freecell-solver/…> prefix, adds some new executables, command line options, and compile-time options, and implements several cleanups and speedups.

Also of note is that the website was improved with a modified design which is friendlier to mobile devices (so-called “responsive” web design), some content updates, and some usability enhancements.

Freecell Solver 4.18.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 4.18.0, has been released. It is available in the form of a source archive, from the download page. Freecell Solver is an open source library and some command line applications, for automatically solving several variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

We now have a Microsoft Freecell deal finder (available online) which is faster than a naive search, provide x86-64 Windows binaries, and have a new “looking-glass” with improved performance.

Freecell Solver 4.4.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 4.4.0, has been released. It is available in the form of a source archive, from the download page. Freecell Solver is an open source library and some command line applications, for automatically solving several variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

This release is dedicated to the memory of Christina Grimmie ( Wikipedia Page ; YouTube account ), a musician and singer whom I was fond of and who was killed on 10 June 2016. The name of the new scan “one-big-family” was inspired by the name of this video of hers. Some others of my favourite videos by Grimmie:

• Cover of “I Will Always Love You”

• Feelin’ Good

• Cover of “Stay” by Rihanna

• Singing “Some Nights” on The Voice

The new release features the new scan, fixes several bugs, and incorporates many code cleanups, refactorings and optimisations. More information can be found in the NEWS.txt / NEWS.html. It also adds the transpose-freecell-board.py program (thanks to Manish for the idea) and removes some old board generation programs that are no longer relevant.

Freecell Solver 4.2.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 4.2.0, has been released. It is available in the form of a source archive, from the download page. Freecell Solver is an open source library and some command line applications, for automatically solving several variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

This release sports the new configuration theme “-l conspiracy-theory” (or “-l ct”) which is somewhat faster than the best contender up to it, “-l amateur-star”, some relatively minor bug fixes, new compile-time options, and many small and somewhat larger code cleanups, refactorings, and optimisations.

“conspiracy-theory” is a reference to the Jewish holiday of Purim, which took place around the time of its release and an old post of mine about it.

Enjoy!

Freecell Solver 4.0.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 4.0.0, has been released. It is available in the form of a source archive, from the download page. Freecell Solver is an open source library and some command line applications, for automatically solving several variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

This release sports the integration of the scans of Tom Holroyd’s patsolve for improved atomic moves-based solving, some other new flags with bug fixes, a transition of the Python code to Python 3, and some other changes that are mentioned in the NEWS file.

The most significant digit was increased due to the integration of patsolve. Enjoy!

Freecell Solver 3.26.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 3.26.0, has been released. It is available in the form of a source archive, from the download page. Freecell Solver is an open source library and some command line applications, for automatically solving several variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell.

This release features some fixes for crashes on malformed input, as reported by the Mayhem team to the Debian bug tracker (thanks!), fixes for newer versions of the GCC compiler, CMake and Games::Solitaire::Verify, and some other changes that are mentioned in the NEWS file.

Enjoy!

Freecell Solver 3.24.0 Release: Mourning Adrian Ettlinger

Freecell Solver version 3.24.0, has been released. Freecell Solver 3.24.0 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 release is dedicated to the memory of Adrian Ettlinger who passed away on 23 October 2013, who was a good Internet friend of the primary maintainer of Freecell Solver (= Shlomi Fish), and who contributed a great deal to Freecell Solver and to Freecell research and programming in general (among other major life achievements, and contributions to man kind). You can read an obituary of Mr. Ettlinger by Shlomi Fish as it was posted to the Freecell Solver Discussions mailing list, and also read an an interview that Fish conducted with him back in 2003.

The new video-editing preset was named in honor of Ettlinger’s previous work in pioneering non-linear video editing back when he worked as an Electrical Engineer (and later as a software developer) for CBS corporation.

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In any case, the main highlights of this release are:

1. New Feature: the -l video-editing (or -l ve for short) flare-based preset that tends to yield shorter solutions on average. See a post with some performance analysis.

2. A bug was fixed when providing input without a trailing newline character (“\n”). This was reported against the online JavaScript version was Olaf and was fixed globally. Thanks, Olaf!

3. The distribution now contains the sources for the Split FCC (= Fully Connected Component) Solver which was an unsuccessful attempt to solve Windows Freecell deal No. 384,243 with two freecells. It may prove of general utility in the future, though.

Hope you enjoy this release and we extend our sadness to the other family members and friends of the late Mr. Ettlinger.

Freecell Solver 3.22.0 was Released: Bug Fixes

Freecell Solver version 3.22.0, has been released. Freecell Solver 3.22.0 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 some bug fixes: the Win32 NSIS (= Nullsoft Installer) package should now build, run and process the presets (e.g: -l as properly). Furthermore, there's a bug fix to the command line flags processing, where flags whose prefixes are known flags were erroneously recognised as such (e.g: --resetjunk vs. --reset).

On the new features side, the JavaScript-based solver now accepts arbitrary fc-solve command line options, so it can be used to solve any of the supported variants of Solitaire, as well as support most other fc-solve features.

Enjoy!

Freecell Solver 3.20.0 was Released: Major Simple Simon Optimisations

Freecell Solver version 3.20.0, has been released. Freecell Solver 3.20.0 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 some major optimisations to the solving code of Simple Simon, as well as many code cleanups, refactorings and smaller optimisations. Furthermore, the “qualified-seed-improved” preset was added, which yields shorter solutions.

Enjoy!

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!

Screencast of Freecell Solver in Action

Yesterday, I spent some time on preparing a screencast of PySolFC auto-solving a deal of Freecell using Freecell Solver . Here's an embedded player:

I remember the first time I saw KDE's KPatience automatically solving a deal of Freecell, while using Freecell Solver as its back-end. Seeing the cards move on their own was very cool, and brought me a lot of joy. Now that PySolFC has built-in support for Freecell Solver, I was able to use it to prepare the screencast. I hope you'll enjoy seeing this screencast, and would be interested in trying out PySolFC and Freecell Solver.

I'm going to blog about how I prepared the screencast on my tech blog, which may prove instructive to other people wanting to prepare screencasts on Linux. This was the first video I ever prepared and producing it proved to be a pleasant experience, even though some tasks did not work right away.

Freecell Solver 2.34.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 2.34.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

Back in the abandoned 2.10.x branch a programmer called Michael Mann contributed a new Simple Simon move function that allowed it to solve more games. In 2.34.0 this move function was restored, and made optional. We now have a theme called "the-last-mohican" (or "tlm" for short), after the movie "The Last of the Mohicans" by a different Michael Mann, which I have watched and enjoyed, that is capable of solving over 90% of the first 5,000 PySol Simple Simon deals. (Incidentally "The Last Mohican" is the direct translation of the book and movie's name in Hebrew). The solutions of the solver were verified to be correct using Games-Solitaire-Verify.

Working on this theme uncovered a bug in the solver where the --next-instance flag was removed by accident, and it is now fixed.

Aside from that, there's now an improved atomic moves theme - "toons-for-twenty-somethings", which can solve all of MS Freecell's 32,000 deals. It is still much slower than the meta-moves-based theme.

There are also some other more minor changes, which can be found at the NEWS file in the distribution.

Freecell Solver 2.30.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 2.30.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

This release adds the run-time presets "gooey-unknown-thing", "sand-stone" and "slick-rock" that aim to minimise the average lengths of the resultant solutions. (as opposed to minimising the time it takes to solve). It also adds support for using any of the tree implementation supplied by libavl version 2 for both the positions storage and the stacks storage.

There's a bug fix in the fc-pro range solver for a bug that caused the Freecell Pro compatible moves to be mis-calculated. Moreover, the code has experienced a substantial re-organisation and the Makefiles for the different compiler were merged into one (which was later fixed).

There are also new compile-time options to exclude various functionality that may not be needed.

Download it while its hot!

Freecell Solver 2.28.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 2.28.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

This version contains several significant optimisations. Now the "freecell-only" preset can solve the first 32,000 Microsoft Freecell deals at 286 deals per second with gcc, and 301 deals per seconds with Intel's icc. (on a Pentium 4 2.4GHz computer). There are many other internal cleanups, build system tweaks, and new makefiles to build using some alternative C compilers.

The source archives from now on will be distributed as tar.bz2 instead of tar.gz which gives better compression, and a faster download.

Freecell Solver 2.26.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 2.26.0 has been released It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

This version contains several significant optimisations (up to the point where the "freecell-only" preset can solve the first 32,000 Microsoft Freecell deals in 200 deals per second.), and improvements to the build system (including the elimination of compiler warnings). Finally, the test suite now builds correctly inside the source distribution.

We have more ideas for optimisations and other enhancements, and this is just an intermediate release (but one which should be perfectly usable).