FreeCell Totally Explained

Everything about Freecell totally explained

FreeCell is a solitaire card game played with a 52-card standard deck. Although implementations vary, most versions label the hands with a number (derived from the random number seed used to generate the hand). FreeCell is fundamentally different from most solitaire games in that most deals can be solved (for example, see the Windows version).

Rules

Construction and layout:

One standard 52-card deck is used.
There are four open cells and four open foundations. Some alternate rules use between one to ten cells.
Cards are dealt evenly into eight cascades. Some alternate rules will use between four to ten cascades.

Building during play:

The top card of each cascade begins a tableau.

Tableaus must be built down by alternating colors.

Foundations are built up by suit. Moves:

Any cell card or top card of any cascade may be moved to build on a tableau, or moved to an empty cell, an empty cascade, or its foundation.

Complete or partial tableaus may be moved to build on existing tableaus, or moved to empty cascades, by recursively placing and removing cards through intermediate locations. While computer implementations often show this motion, players using physical decks typically move the tableau at once. Victory:

The game is won after all cards are moved to their foundation piles. For games with the standard layout (four open cells and eight cascades) most games are easily solved. The Windows version article contains a section that discusses unsolved games.

History

One of the oldest ancestors of FreeCell is Eight Off. In the June 1968 edition of Scientific American, Martin Gardner described in his "Mathematical Games" column a game by C. L. Baker that's similar to FreeCell, except that cards on the tableau are built by suit rather than by alternate colors. This variant is now called Baker's Game. FreeCell's origins may date back even further to 1945 and a Scandinavian game called Napoleon in St. Helena (not the game Napoleon at St. Helena, also known as Forty Thieves).
   Paul Alfille changed Baker's Game by making cards build according to alternate colors, thus creating FreeCell. He implemented the first computerised version of it in the TUTOR programming language for the PLATO educational computer system in 1978. Paul managed to display easily recognisable graphical images of playing cards on the 512×512 monochrome display on the PLATO systems.
   This original FreeCell environment allowed games with 4–10 columns and 1–10 cells in addition to the standard 8×4 game. For each variant, the program stored a ranked list of the players with the longest winning streaks. There was also a tournament system that allowed people to compete to win difficult hand-picked deals. Paul Alfille describes this early FreeCell environment in more detail in an interview from 2000.
   The game gained worldwide popularity thanks to Jim Horne, who learned the game from the PLATO system and implemented a version of the game with color graphics for Windows. It was first included with Microsoft Win32s as a test program, then in Microsoft's Entertainment Pack Volume 2 and the later "best of microsoft entertainment pack". However Freecell remained relatively obscure until it was made a part of Windows 95 and has been included with every version of Windows since The result implies that writing a computer algorithm that finds solutions for arbitrary FreeCell configurations of the generalized version quickly would be a major scientific breakthrough. A perfect FreeCell playing program running in polynomial time would earn the discoverer a $1,000,000 prize for solving one of the Clay Mathematics Institute's Millennium Prize Problems. However, most researchers believe that no such efficient solution procedure exists.

Solvers

One of the passions of several FreeCell enthusiasts was to construct computer programs that could automatically solve FreeCell. Don Woods wrote a solver for FreeCell and several similar games as early as 1997.
Another known solver is Patsolve of Tom Holroyd

. Patsolve uses atomic moves, and since version 3.0 incorporated a weighting function based on the results of a genetic algorithm that made it much faster. Shlomi Fish started his own solver

beginning in March 2000. This solver was simply dubbed "Freecell Solver".
Gary Campbell wrote a solver for FreeCell for DOS in 8086 Assembly. This solver weighs in at 12 kilobytes, and is quite fast.

The Internet FreeCell Project

When Microsoft FreeCell became very popular during the 1990s it wasn't clear which of the 32,000 deals in the program were solvable. To clarify the situation, Dave Ring started The Internet FreeCell Project, took on the problem to try to solve all the deals using human solvers. Ring assigned 100 consecutive games chunks across volunteering human solvers and collected the games that they reported to be unsolvable, and assigned them to other people. This project used the power of multiprocessing, where the processors were human brains, to quickly converge on the answer. The project was finished in October 1995, and only one game defied every human player's attempt: #11,982, which has also defied every known solution program, and is generally accepted to be unsolvable .
Some of the automated solvers used for trying out Game #11,982, such as Patsolve and Shlomi Fish's solver (in certain configurations) are known to be exhaustive and try out every possible single-card ("atomic") move.

Further Information

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