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.

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.