Freecell Madness!
So I was playing AcidFreecell earlier, and no matter what I did I just couldn’t get anywhere in this one particular game. It was particularly evil because there were 4 different cards that had two of the same color stacked on top of each other. Both of the red 9s were on each other, the red 3s, the red Jacks, and the black 7s. And probably other evil little combinations that I have since purged from my mind. (In case anyone wants to really torture themselves, this was game #44416.)
So after 2 hours and dozens of restarts, I finally gave up and said to hell with it, I don’t want to do this anymore. So I went out and found a wonderful little application called freecell-solver. It’s a functional implementation of the freecell-solver library that takes a text input file describing the layout of the game, and then solves it for you. The solution might not be pretty, but it works. So I typed in the positions of all the cards by hand and about 4 seconds later, I had a solution. And having gone through it, I’m pretty sure that there is NO way I ever would have finished the game the good old fashioned way. The solution ended up juggling all of the cards around to get rid of all of the club-suit cards one by one while leaving almost everything else still out. In other words, I got rid of the king of clubs and all of the other suits were still only up to 3 or 4 in their respective piles. Just a huge mess. But I’m finally done with it so I don’t have to worry about it anymore.
