Is it possible to win every game or just some?
If you go for the “Vegas” scoring system, I’m pretty sure many games are impossible, as you only get one view of the cards in the deck (or three, if you opt for deals of 3 cards at a time). I’m also pretty sure that there are a siginificant number of deals where one cannot win however many times one sees the deck, if certain cards are hidden under others. In fact, this is easy to show by example: consider the possible deal where all four aces are covered by all four 3s, which are covered by all four 2s. The twos can never be moved and so the game can never be won.
ETA: of course, this is a pretty unlikely scenario, but there must be other more common ones that make the win impossible.
Hijack: does anyone know if all games of Freecell are winnable?
I’m pretty sure that the hidden -1 and -2 Freecell games are impossible. Man, I haven’t touched those games since I worked for that chapter 11 insurance company…
I thought there were only a certain number of possible Freecell deals, and they were all numbered positively? Actually, thinking about it, there must be way more than ~33000 possible deals - the figure is 52!, is it not (52 possible cards to occupy the first position, multiplied by the remaining 51 possibilities for the next position, etc.)? Certainly >33000, anyway! I wonder how those 33000 are determined?
I used to work with the guy who wrote the original Freecell* for Windows NT…
The game number is just the seed to the random number generator. It’s done that way so that if you find a tricky game, you can tell a friend the game number and they can get the same deal.
It’s trivial to construct an impossible Freecell game. Numbers -1 and -2 are hard-coded to show you such impossible layouts.
In the 1990’s, the Internet Freecell Project was started to test all 32,000 games. A few were found to be really hard. Number 11,982 was found to be unsolvable. Apparently the project continues, to test all 1,000,000 games in Windows XP.
It’s amazing, the parallel processing power of large numbers of people who are bored at work.
- He didn’t invent the game itself, but he did write the first Windows implementation.
It’s possible to win every game of Solitaire by cheating. Select Vegas, Draw Three, then hold Ctrl-Alt-Shift and they draw out one card at a time. Therefore, you’re playing the same game as Draw One only you get to go through the deck 3 times, not just once. For the standard game the cheat works, but there’s also no limit on how many times you can go through the deck, so it’s somewhat academic.
As was said before, of the regular Freecell games, 11982 is impossible. Some are more difficult than others, but 11982 is the only one that can’t be beaten.
Good answers, people. Airman, even with the cheat there are going to be a few impossible games (unless the program is coded to avoid these deals).