This may belong in the Game Room but I think it may be more of a math question than a gaming question. Using 8 suits and 10 rows (like the game that comes with MS) what is the least number of moves needed to win the game? Does this number change with added suits? How would one figure this out?
Seems to me the least possible number of moves is whatever number of cards you have.
Please explain the reasoning. Thanks.
P.S., I can see that it would be the number of cards you have minus 8. Is that correct?
You have ten piles and you can move cards together if they’re in order and remove them when they’re a complete sequence. Right? In that scenario there is a combination of cards which lets you remove all the cards after moving them at most once.
Imagine a simplified situation with all the cards on the table.
Imagine one of the first cards is a king and you have next highest cards in that suit visible. Move nine cards onto the king and nine more cards are available. (I’m not counting flipping over a face down card as a move.) Three of these are the necessary suit, so you move them and then remove the completede sequence. We’re now back to the start, only with fewer cards in the piles. Repeat until all cards are gone.
Counting moving a card and removing the completede sequence as moves, and not counting turning a card over or dealing out the remaining cards as moves, we get one move per card.
Arranging the cards so this is possible could be achieved simply by dealing them in sequence in the opposite order of removal.
Ah, I was not counting removing the completed suit as a move. Nor flipping or dealing. Which is why I said all the cards minus 8-- those being the kings that do not have to be moved.
But if flipping, dealing and moving counted that would be, um, more than the number of cards.
Wait a minute. If this scenario is true than it wouldn’t matter how many rows you have. Or you’d need at least as many rows as suits. With more rows than suits or less rows than suits, wouldn’t that change things somehow?
My math and logic bones aren’t working.
I don’t think so. Imagine you have two collumns and two suits. Lets use just five cards for each and label them ABCDE for one suit and abcde for the other. Imagine they are placed like this in to collumns:
a e
b A
d B
c C
E D
Now you can move one card at a time onto E, remove the completed sequence and then move the second suit onto e.
More collumns, more suits, cards to be delt during the game. There’s always a way to arrange them so one move per card suffices.
Not counting dealing, turning, and removing, the minimum is 46 moves.
You start with 54 cards in the tableau. To get the minimum, all the kings must be somewhere in the tableau. When cards are dealt, they must be placed on top of the next card up in sequence. That is, a 2 of Clubs must be dealt on top of a 3 of Clubs, a 6 of Diamonds must go on a 7 of Diamonds, etc. This means the dealt cards do not have to be further moved. So the only cards that have to be moved are the non-kings in the tableau. There are 46 of those.
Now if you count dealing, then it is indeed 96 moves. Or 51, if you count a deal of 10 cards as one move. Counting turning and removing will up the total, of course.
54 cards?
But there are 52 cards in the deck…
The OP was talking about the version that comes with Windows. That version (and every version I’ve seen) is played with a double deck of 104 cards. The initial tableau is 54 cards in 10 columns. The other 50 cards are dealt out in 5 sets of 10 cards each.
I play spider solitaire [on my computer] using the one suit option and have finished a game in 96 moves several times, with a score of 1204, can’t seem to do better than that moves wise, but I have had a higher score a few times because of a bug (I think the highest I got was 1288)
and today I managed 1206 in 94 moves
“Scoring” is really iffy to compare given that different programs use different scoring systems. (As well as number of decks used, suite stacking rules, etc.)
My fave was the old Sun OS/Solaris version. No auto moving completed piles, allowed scoring to 1000 (not moving piles is a plus), etc. (The current Linux version is not the same.)
I use John Junod’s old Windows Spider Solitaire on WinTel boxes. Also no auto moves, but scoring only goes up to 990. (Forces you to move piles up to “win”.) Unfortunately a resource hog and can’t use on a laptop, even with priority set low.
It has a lowest move count for me of 225, two decks. But since I don’t go for lowest moves, but solving without moving piles up, I could have probably done much better.
The current MS version is the worst version I have ever seen. It’s useless.
Funny question that I’ve been wondering about for years. One time I got a 1204 which calculates to 96 moves & it was a few years ago. I just got it in 99 moves for which I had a minor celebration. I’ve gotten a lot of 99’s or 1201’s which ever way you look at.
The funny part is when I got the 96 I wasn’t really paying attention that much & I was blown away at the end. Ever since I have tried various methods to get that score, some games I start building from the lowest cards & up, other times I go from the top down and it seems the harder I concentrate the lower my score is, frustrating in deed, So far with my current laptop my highs are all 1201’s or 99’s
I just cannot see it being mathematically possible to beat 96 moves, for a long time I thought getting 100 moves was the perfect score,lol
I have been playing this game for some time now and consistently get 95-101 scores. This morning I freaked when I got a 92. Now I have to keep playing to see if I can get a lower score.
I have to admit that I am addicted to the game and I have many games with fewer moves than this–143 lower than 90 in the last four years. I used to print out my best scores, but now take screenshots whenever I score lower than 90 (single suit). I just completed one this morning with 88 moves. I have been saving the screenshots on my current laptop since 2009, and my best is 84 moves. It became obvious to me years ago that there are too many coincidences for the deals to be random, so there must be a correct way to play it. To get the lowest number of moves I try for the longest sequence without moving a card to a stack that has all of the cards exposed. I do move to said stack if there is no alternative. If there is no alternative I consider the move mandatory as long as it doesn’t empty the row. I never empty a row before the last screen. My strategy for the first screen is moving the highest card possible. If there are two equal cards to move, the first choice is the stack with the most cards remaining, and the next tie breaker is the stack on the left.
Whenever I save a screenshot I include a date clock in the capture. I do this because my program has the wrong date and also has an incorrect highest score. I disregard the score because for me the important thing is fewest moves. I found this forum when I was searching for a way to correct the incorrect date and high score. I was looking for a way to include a screenshot here for proof but don’t see the option.
I was doing a Google search for the fewest number of moves in Spider Solitaire when I happened upon this forum. I never kept track of what the highest score was…just the number of moves that it took to complete this totally addicting game (especially when I’m killing time waiting on the phone).
Based upon my own usage, I’m starting to believe that the lowest number of moves is 86. I first hit 86 on 2/25/05. Of course this started me on a quest to break that. It took over three years, but I hit 86 again on 10/24/08. And, of course (the mark of a true addict), this compelled me to keep trying. I hit 86 moves again this month (3/14/13). Considering the time that it took between “86’s” I am now fairly convinced that any number of moves less than that is probably impossible.
Apparently my relationship with Spider solitaire is completely different than that of everyone else. I like the high-move games the best: nothing is more satisfying than putting order to something that is a crumpled, distorted mess, and the very best games are the ones where you need to break runs up and reconfigure them a dozen different ways to work your way up a row to get to the card you need.
86 is an excellent score, and I have done it four times, but I have scored lower. I scored 84 moves on 1/5/2012, 85 moves 9/28/2011, and 85 moves 6/9/2011. I have the screenshots to prove it. These are all playing the Win7 version, which does not permit you to replay a game as the earlier versions did. I only take screenshots of games with fewer than 90 moves. I have 150 of them dating from 11/26/2009 when I received this Win7 laptop. I haven’t checked my older computers for scores.