I am really and truly impressed you did this. If I’m not doing any of those things with this program… and anyone can see for themselves whether I am… then all possible minuscule avenues have been covered, and the puzzle is impossible.Ĭomment by Adrian Wood on Ap 2:23 Nicely done.
If something’s been missed, then good news you only have to check a few hundred lines of code (included comments explaining what’s going on) to find it rather than well over 80,000 individual board layouts, a relatively simple task.įor this puzzle to be possible, either I’m not correctly testing for every move that can be made on a layout, incorrectly discarded valid moves, or not sending every valid layout to be tested. Set up some solvable puzzles and see if it gets there, or put in obviously impossible ones and see if it throws them out. Check the layout I’m using, peruse the code, run it yourself, browse the results. Clubs and spades? Forget it you can’t even get started.īut don’t take my word for it. Getting the ace of one puts you in a position where you cannot reach the ace of the other. There are paths that lead to two hearts being sent home, or two diamonds… but these are exclusive.
This lists, literally, every possible layout of cards you can reach for 11982, and (if you wish) can trace them back to see what moves were made to get there.
You will probably want to click the download link in the bottom-right corner and view it on your computer, rather than wait for Google’s preview of all 36+ mb to load up. Source Explanation is a more detailed explanation of what the program is, how it works, and what it means.ġ1982 results.txt is the (rather large) results file. Python programs are compiled on-the-fly, which means the program is the source code you can open it in any text editor and see exactly what the program is doing. Welcome to cell11982, a brute force freecell solver, by default set up to test the impossible puzzle, 11982. With that in mind, and because I’m a money-where-my-mouth-is kind of guy: I don’t feel the difference between “possible” and “impossible” is “splitting hairs”, I think it’s a fundamental issue in the discussion. So let’s be clear this puzzle isn’t highly improbably, likely impossible, or nigh impossible. So there is no clever solution waiting that simply hasn’t been found, because literally everything has been tried, multiple times. There are numerous freecell solving programs out there that do this (despite some concerns above about processing power, this kind of task is exactly what computers do well and far within the capacity of even an older computer to do quickly) and, as mentioned in the article, many have been applied. The simplest, and longest, way is simply to try every possible set of moves at every juncture until you reach a point where there are no moves left to make (or only moves that go in a loop, like moving the same card back and forth), and no solution was found. This is a mathematical problem, and as such absolutely can be proven impossible. I’ve noticed a lot of comments here over the years saying things along the lines of “this can’t be proven impossible”. – A non-trivial algorithm has been used to create freecell game.ītw, sorry for the mistakes I could have done, i’m absolutly not a native speaker ^^ – The Steven Smith algorithm is the good one, then 11982 is theorically possible, but could need like 1000000 plays to be win. – I’m wrong about the “quantity” of impossible starts, then 11982 could be one of them I don’t know the solution of my question, however I think there are “many” impossible starts which could lead to a lose. If it’s about 1/32000 or less, then this algorithm could have been used by Microsoft to create freecell game. Then we should look at the probability to create an impossible game with the second algorithm. However, it seems it’s the only not-sure-to-be-winnable game, for 32 000 games. The second one can obviously create impossible game, and 11982 might be one of them. – The “stupid-one” : put the card in a random way on the board. – the way explained by Steven Smith, which can’t create an impossible game What’s interesting me the most is not is this game is possible or not, but the way games are created.įreecell games are obviously created in a pseudo-random way, they’re two obvious way to create a game : Comment by Pugs on Decem 11:40 : the problem is that “impossible” is not a political issue, but a mathematical one :-P