Freecell Solver

This is Freecell Solver - a program that automatically solves layouts of Freecell and similar variants of Card Solitaire such as Eight Off, Forecell and Seahaven Towers, as well as Simple Simon boards. Freecell Solver is free and open source software freely available under the MIT/X11 License. It is written in ANSI C and requires a C compiler to be built. Nevertheless, binaries for Microsoft Windows 32-bit are available.

Included with the archive is source code for programs that can automatically feed it with the boards of several popular Solitaire Implementations.

Freecell Solver can also be built as a library for use within your own Solitaire implementations. A more detailed list of features can be found in the Features List.

News

23-Jul-2009: Screencast of Freecell Solver in Action

Yesterday, I spent some time on preparing a screencast of PySolFC auto-solving a deal of Freecell using Freecell Solver . Here's an embedded player:

I remember the first time I saw KDE's KPatience automatically solving a deal of Freecell, while using Freecell Solver as its back-end. Seeing the cards move on their own was very cool, and brought me a lot of joy. Now that PySolFC has built-in support for Freecell Solver, I was able to use it to prepare the screencast. I hope you'll enjoy seeing this screencast, and would be interested in trying out PySolFC and Freecell Solver.

I'm going to blog about how I prepared the screencast on my tech blog, which may prove instructive to other people wanting to prepare screencasts on Linux. This was the first video I ever prepared and producing it proved to be a pleasant experience, even though some tasks did not work right away.

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11-Jul-2009: Freecell Solver 2.34.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 2.34.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

Back in the abandoned 2.10.x branch a programmer called Michael Mann contributed a new Simple Simon move function that allowed it to solve more games. In 2.34.0 this move function was restored, and made optional. We now have a theme called "the-last-mohican" (or "tlm" for short), after the movie "The Last of the Mohicans" by a different Michael Mann, which I have watched and enjoyed, that is capable of solving over 90% of the first 5,000 PySol Simple Simon deals. (Incidentally "The Last Mohican" is the direct translation of the book and movie's name in Hebrew). The solutions of the solver were verified to be correct using Games-Solitaire-Verify.

Working on this theme uncovered a bug in the solver where the --next-instance flag was removed by accident, and it is now fixed.

Aside from that, there's now an improved atomic moves theme - "toons-for-twenty-somethings", which can solve all of MS Freecell's 32,000 deals. It is still much slower than the meta-moves-based theme.

There are also some other more minor changes, which can be found at the NEWS file in the distribution.

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26-Jun-2009: Maintenance Freecell Solver 2.32.1 Release

Hot on the heels of Freecell Solver 2.32.0, there's now a 2.32.1 maintenance release available from the download page. This release fixes several important build bugs, especially on Windows, but also on UNIXes.

Please test it to see if any other problems remain.

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24-Jun-2009: Freecell Solver 2.32.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 2.32.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

This version features a large code cleanup which also resulted in a substantial speed boost. The code cleanup was guided by a script that was written to list all occurences of identifiers with the same name, in order to find uncommon identifiers.

There were several bug-fixes done to the CMake-based build system, and there's now suppot for Google's tcmalloc and hidden internal identifiers in the DLL/shared-library. The inline keyword for definining inline functions is now supported on more compilers and more functions or macros have been converted to inline functions.

We hope you enjoy this release.

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07-Jun-2009: Freecell Solver 2.30.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 2.30.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

This release adds the run-time presets "gooey-unknown-thing", "sand-stone" and "slick-rock" that aim to minimise the average lengths of the resultant solutions. (as opposed to minimising the time it takes to solve). It also adds support for using any of the tree imlpementation supplied by libavl version 2 for both the positions storage and the stacks storage.

There's a bug fix in the fc-pro range solver for a bug that caused the Freecell Pro compatible moves to be mis-calculated. Moreover, the code has experienced a substantial re-organisation and the Makefiles for the different compiler were merged into one (which was later fixed).

There are also new compile-time options to exclude various functionality that may not be needed.

Download it while its hot!

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29-May-2009: Adventures in Compiling

I've generally been using GCC (= The GNU Compiler Collection) exclusively for compiling Freecell Solver under Linux for its constant development. For a time, I used to compile the Windows binaries using Microsoft Visual C ("cl.exe") and a really hideous batch file I wrote for the purpose (so it would work on the Technion's computers). Lately, however, I've switched to compiling using MinGW on Windows, which is gcc based.

A few weeks ago, I decided to try out other compilers and see what they had to offer. I downloaded the proprietary icc (Intel's C Compiler), which is gcc-compatible and has a Linux trial version. It was a huge download and ended up occupying a lot of space on the hard-disk. At first, I could not get it to emit working code, but after messing a little with my makefiles, I was successful. It is about the same speed as gcc for compiling my ANSI C program (maybe a bit slower), and generates somewhat faster code.

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icc kept emitting many of the so-called "remarks" which I eventually took upon myself to eliminate. This improved the quality of my code. But it worked properly with these many remarks being emitted. After installing icc, msec (the Mandriva security mechanism) complained about world-writable files in the icc installation, so I reported it on the Intel forum.

The next compiler I tried was tcc, the Tiny/Turbo C Compiler. The version in the Mandriva repositories was old and did not yield a working binary, and so I tried upgrading to version 0.9.24 and then to the git version, but none of them worked either. I reported this attempt to the tcc mailing list.

I also tried icc's -fast flag, which is supposed to make the output faster, but it actually made the binaries slower (much slower than even gcc).

However, later on, after cleaning up my makefile, tcc produced perfectly working binaries. I don't know what the problem was, but it was solved. (I reported that in a reply). Compiling with tcc is much faster than with gcc, but the resulting code is much slower than gcc's, and occupies more space on the disk.

The next compiler was TenDRA. Now the homepage a 403 (and still does) and so I went on Freenode and asked. I eventually did: 

$ svn co http://svn.tendra.org/trunk/

Only to discover that http://svn.tendra.org/trunk/tendra/INSTALL is empty except for a reference to the Trac web-site (which was also off-line). So I needed to use the guidance of the people from Freenode's #tendra to build it.

In the process, I had to install bmake, because that's the only make that would compile TenDRA. The ./configure in the standard distribution failed to work here, but I was able to find an .src.rpm which compiled and installed fine. The TenDRA boot process also complained about one of my system's header which had a list or enum with a trailing comma, and I had to manually fix the code.

But I was able to build TenDRA and install it, and it was able to compile a working program. Before it did, though, I had to fix many compilation errors it reported, as TenDRA is stricter than gcc. It also didn't recognise my use of strdup, and I had to specify -Ysystem for it to work (the previous -Y's I tried did not work properly). But then it worked.

TenDRA generated larger and slower executables than gcc but it worked.

I failed to get lcc (which isn't strictly open source ) and pcc (which is open source ) to either compile or produce working code. Seems like neither of them are ready for prime time - at least not here on Mandriva Linux Cooker.

So after a lot of frustration, my experiments with different compilers were mostly successful. As a result, my code is more strict, and better tested. So I guess it was worth it.

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17-May-2009: Freecell Solver 2.28.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 2.28.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

This version contains several significant optimisations. Now the "freecell-only" preset can solve the first 32,000 Microsoft Freecell deals at 286 deals per second with gcc, and 301 deals per seconds with Intel's icc. (on a Pentium 4 2.4GHz computer). There are many other internal cleanups, build system tweaks, and new makefiles to build using some alternative C compilers.

The source archives from now on will be distributed as tar.bz2 instead of tar.gz which gives better compression, and a faster download.

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