/ 
Freecell-App-0.01
River stage zero No dependents
/ freecell-solver

NAME

freecell-solver - solve a FreeCell game by number

SYNOPSIS

freecell-solver [options]

Options:

--gameno <int>   Solve FreeCell for game <int> (required, 1-1000000)

--maxnodes <int> Maximum number of nodes to search per level
                 (default is --maxnodes 2000)

--winxp          A switch to make sure the solution is valid for XP. If
                 you get the message "Game solution not valid for XP!"
                 you can use this flag to solve specifically for XP.
                 Over half the solutions are already valid for Windows 
                 XP, Vista and 7 (default is --nowinxp) 

--showall        A switch to log all the Tableaus and moves for the 
                 solution. (default is --noshowall)

Example:

freecell-solver --gameno 1070

NOTE. The result HTML page image tag src location.>

The generated HTML page needs suit images to display correctly. You should copy these to where your html pages are at.

site\lib\auto\share\dist\Freecell-App\Freecell\c.png
site\lib\auto\share\dist\Freecell-App\Freecell\d.png
site\lib\auto\share\dist\Freecell-App\Freecell\h.png
site\lib\auto\share\dist\Freecell-App\Freecell\s.png

DESCRIPTION

freecell-solver is a perl application to solve Freecell using a breadth-first search with a simple heuristic to trim the 'seen' position hash to prevent an out-of-memory condition.

--maxnodes considerations

The default of 2000 seems to work quiet well and on a 32 bit distribution of Perl, setting it to 8000 to solve gameno 1070 will crash the interpreter.

I use Activeperl 5.16.1 x64 and an Intel quad core i5-2500K and 8GB of memory and have no trouble running 3 solutions at a time in their own console with --maxnodes 25000. Each solution takes about 30 minutes. I have successfully solved games at --maxnodes 100000 but they each take over 2 hours and usually don't improve the solution. With a 64 bit version of Perl I haven't seen the interpreter crash but I have seen the CPU consumption go from 25% to 2% telling me that I'm out of physical memory and swapping. Better lower maxnodes!

The Heuristic

The algorithm is simple.

  • Start with 64.

  • Subtract the rank of all the top home cards.

  • Subtract 1 for each empty freecell and empty column.

  • Add 1 for each sequence break in the cascade e.g. 6C 5H 4S 2C KD QS TH has 3 sequence breaks, one major at 2C because the KD is greater than the 2C.

Before the search of the next level, the nodes to be search are sorted by their score and only the top maxnodes qualify for the next search and all the remaining nodes are deleted from the position hash.

author: Shirl Hart
email:  shirha@cpan.org