Some computational problems can be efficiently solved through massive multiprocessing; thousands of CPUs working together to provide a solution. Sometimes those CPUs can be human brains. As so often happens in life, FreeCell provides a nice example.
Years ago I wrote a sentence for the FreeCell help file that said "It is believed (although not proven) that every game is winnable." This was carefully worded because, it turns out, it's fairly easy to construct FreeCell shuffles that can’t be won. Enter game number negative one or negative two for examples.
What I didn’t know at the time was whether any of the 32,000 shuffles provided with Microsoft FreeCell were unwinnable. Certainly most of them could be beaten, if not by me then by my colleague Greg Jones. I thought about trying to prove it by writing a game solver and pointing it at all 32,000 games, but I already had a game solver -- my brain. It was just too slow.
Way back in 1995 when the Internet was already established but not quite mainstream, a chap named Dave Ring started the Internet FreeCell Project. If you wanted to participate, you let him know and he sent you a list of 100 or so game numbers. Your job was to report back which ones you beat and which ones stumped you. The ones you couldn't win got thrown back into the pot to be doled out to somebody else. Eventually the games got harder and harder and soon there was only one which nobody could beat, the famous number 11,982. What a great example of the power of the Internet.
Definitive proof that this game was impossible came soon after through traditional computational methods, but humans found the answer first and along the way did something computers couldn't. They had fun.
A couple from Israel solved 11982
You can ask Microsoft Israel to approve it.
Posted by: Dudi | May 30, 2005 at 04:19 AM
so....I am wrong and 178 CAN be beaten?
Posted by: jack cady | April 08, 2008 at 07:10 PM