As you recall, Gary Campbell’s comment provided the motivation for my investigation into what makes a project high-quality and which quality-increasing-measures are not elements of quality by themselves. And since Freecell Solver has been my pet project, and as I’m still interested in techniques for solving Solitaire, I’d like to conclude this essay by analysing the various solvers according to the parameters I described. The natural caveat is that I may be somewhat biased due to the fact that I authored a solver of my own.
I was not so sure including this section is a good idea, but I feel the article is incomplete without it. Feel free to skip it, in case you are not that interested in it. [FC-S-Comp]
[FC-S-Comp] This section is not meant as a comprehensive comparison of the Freecell solvers. The latter has yet to be written and would be much more difficult than what I’m doing here. It would be complicated by factors such as:
Some solvers are binary-only and only run on DOS or Windows. Open-source command-line ones may probably perform better on Linux or other Unix systems.
Some of them are not publicly available in any form.
Some of them can only solve Freecell, while others are more generic and can solve other Solitaire variants. (which in turn may hurt their performance.)
They differ in their solving algorithms. For example, some use atomic (= one-card) moves, some move entire sequences at a time, and some are based on meta-moves.