FreeCell
Apr 14th, 2005 by Brian A. Thomas
I was thinking that it would be cool to make a website about FreeCell, the card game that comes with Windows. I figure I would make a site to document every possible solution to every possible deal. It would be a big effort since the original FreeCell on Windows had 32,000 deals… but somebody already did it… sort of. They don’t list every possible solution, and as a matter of fact, don’t give a solution to all 32,000 deals, but there are sites out there devoted to FreeCell.
Before giving the rundown on FreeCell sites, here are some facts.
The original Microsoft FreeCell has, as I mentioned, 32,000 deals. Of these, only deal #11982 is impossible to solve, all the rest can be solved.
Microsoft upgraded FreeCell for Windows XP, while the original 32,000 deals are the same, it now has 1 million deals. Of those 1 million, only 8 are not solvable. (Beyond the 11982, there is 146692, 186216, 455889, 495505, 512118, 517776, 781948).
The program(s) do not have a table saying the Jack of spades on deal 1941 (one of the hardest, if not the hardest solvable deals in the original FreeCell) is the 3rd card from the bottom, 2nd column, rather it relies on the fact that if you seed the random function with 1941, you will get the same results each time… “True” random numbers on a computer are generated by counting the seconds from some time in history (who’s date and year and time escape me now) to the time the program calls for the number, so in theory, two computers using the same program at the exact same time will get the exact same number… which makes it kind of not a true random number at all. Anyhow, it is this predictability in random numbers that make FreeCell work. Give the random number generator 1941, and it will produce the exact same numbers every time.
Anyhow, I doubt anyone here really cares about how hard it is to get a truly random number out of a computer, or how FreeCell generates the cards, so on to the links.
Solitaire Laboratory has a FreeCell FAQ, General Information and Solutions, Difficult Deals List, an Illustrated FreeCell Tutorial, and is the location to download FreeCell Pro, a program that records your solutions, solves hands, lets you set the number of free cells from 0 to 7, and many other cool features.
FreeCell.org is the first site I ran across, and where I’ll end this list. Lots of it’s links come back to the above links anyhow, but it is still worth a stop.
Have you tried game 8836 in MS FreeCell?