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.

Freecell Solver 3.2.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 3.2.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page. We hope to release a Windows binary soon.

This release implements the --depth-tests-order flag that allows varying the tests' order based on the depth which allows for interesting (and faster) searches. Several new presets : -l the-iglu-cabal , -l foss-nessy and -l tea-for-two have been added , the latter optimised for two freecell deals. There are also several bug-fixes, optimisations and code cleanups.

Freecell Solver 3.0.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 3.0.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page. We hope to release a Windows binary soon.

This release implements the flares API (see the usage document), which allows running several alternative scans and then picking up the one with the shortest solution. It also adds the -l children-playing-ball and -l sentient-pearls presets that optimise on solution length (based on flares).

Also see the post about this release to the fc-solve-discuss mailing list giving some of the motivation for the new major release digit (3.x.y instead of 2.x.y).

Freecell Solver 2.40.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 2.40.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

This release contains a fix to a string overflow with processing the command line arguments, and an optimised command-line preset that can be invoked as -l blue-yonder (or -l by for short) that solves the Microsoft 32,000 deals in under 100 seconds on a Pentium 4 2.4GHz machine. It also contains some more minor changes: there is now a Scan: header with the name of the current soft thread, when debugging under -s -i, an off-by-1 iterations count was fixed and the iteration handling callback is now applied globally to all the instances. Finally, make_pysol_freecell_board.py has support for generating PySol's and PySolFC's "Black Hole" Solitaire deals, intended for my newly released Black Hole Solitaire Solver.

Enjoy!

Freecell Solver 2.38.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 2.38.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

This is a minor release which makes sure one can build Freecell Solver outside the source distribution (e.g: mkdir build ; cd build ; cmake ..) without AsciiDoc, adds a --pysolfc (or an -F for short) flag to make_pysol_freecell_board.py and fixes one of the help displays.

Freecell Solver 2.36.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 2.36.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

The main highlight of this release is that the plaintext documentation that was part of the source distribution were converted to AsciiDoc, a lightweight markup language that allows the plaintext and human-readable sources to be converted to HTML, to DocBook/XML, to PDF and to other formats. As a result, they are now also available online in HTML formats.

Furthermore, the process for getting the test suite and benchmarking process up and running were considerably simplified, thanks to the input received by Dimitri Leca (Pythack).

Finally, there are some other more minor improvements. This release has been delayed quite a bit due to some neglect on the part of the main maintainer, but we hope you find what's new satisfying enough. Happy solving!

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.

Maintenance Freecell Solver 2.32.1 Release

Hot on the heels of Freecell Solver 2.32.0, there's now a 2.32.1 maintenance release available from the download page. This release fixes several important build bugs, especially on Windows, but also on UNIXes.

Please test it to see if any other problems remain.

Freecell Solver 2.32.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 2.32.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

This version features a large code cleanup which also resulted in a substantial speed boost. The code cleanup was guided by a script that was written to list all occurrences of identifiers with the same name, in order to find uncommon identifiers.

There were several bug-fixes done to the CMake-based build system, and there's now support for Google's tcmalloc and hidden internal identifiers in the DLL/shared-library. The inline keyword for defining inline functions is now supported on more compilers and more functions or macros have been converted to inline functions.

We hope you enjoy this release.

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).

Freecell Solver 2.24.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 2.24.0 was released today. It is available in a source archive from the download page. Windows command-line binaries should be available momentarily.

This version contains some fixes to crashes and memory leaks when using the -opt with a range of boards (or otherwise when a solver instance is recycled), a new "freecell-solver-fc-pro-range-solve" executable (built by default, but not installed), which runs a range of deals using the solver and outputs the number of FCS moves, the number of FC-Pro moves, and the FC-Pro moves in standard notation.

For developers, this release also contains a build type for profiling, many cleanups to the code, and a makefile to generate LLVM bitcode.

Freecell Solver 2.22.0 was Released, Now Under the MIT/X11 License

Freecell Solver version 2.22.0 is now available for download from the download page. This release converts from Public Domain "licensing" which is problematic for source code to the more explicit and less controversial MIT/X11 License. (Some source files that had been originated by other parties are still under the public domain).

Also in this release is some fixes to the build system (in part thanks to a contribution by Risko Gergely), including the ability to prepare a static library.

Happy solving, and enjoy April Fool's Day Tomorrow.

Freecell Solver 2.20.0 was Released, along with a Windows Installer

Freecell Solver version 2.20.0 is now available for download from the download page. The big news is that executables for Microsoft Windows (x86) are now available for it, for the first time since the early 2.8.x releases. And this time, they come in the form of an interactive "Next→Next→Finish" installer based on the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS).

Also in this release are a fix to a crash when using the range solver with the "-opt" flag (and other similar scenarios), a more comprehensive NEWS file and some other fixes.