spider playability
Anonymous
GUESTS
Congrats on making the only spider solitaire that I can stand to play (besides the one I wrote myself!) Complete undo/redo is essential for playing this particular solitaire. I am more of a "show me the one you think is unsolvable and I will show your how to solve it" rather than "look how fast I solved one" kind of guy. On first glance, your leader boards are more for speed freaks. Is there any list of "unsolvable" boards that I can get to? The only thing I would like to have is a way to save a game I have worked on - sone of the more difficult ones have taken me weeks to find the solution and I rely heavily on saving a promising game to come back later to try something else.
Anyway, good job on your site!
Dave
Anyway, good job on your site!
Dave
Comments
Thanks. We couldn't agree more with respect to undo/redo and Spider. You might have already noticed, but we have another feature that really helps you search the solution space more broadly because you waste less memory on boring moves; that is we'll move cards out of your way from your source and destination stack. This allows you to look ahead to the important moves while assuming the obvious moves will get done automatically.
You are right for most games on Green Felt, except (Four Suit) Spider doesn't lend itself to speed because of how long it takes to win. Some days only a few people can win the game of the day.
Looking at our "Games of the Day" from the past three months, there was only one Spider shuffle that wasn't solved at all. These two were solved only a few times. Post again once you've solved them and I'll try harder to find more.
Thanks again, and thanks for taking the time to write.
-Jim
The Spider game of the day from 2013-08-05 was also not beaten and this one from 2013-05-26 only had 2 people beat it! Those are the hardest ones from the last 5 months.
-Jim
If I get it, the "game of the day" is the only layout that gets you on the leader board, right? And you can go back and try it as many times as you want to get a better time, right? If the people getting these boards in under 10 minutes are doing that in their first tries, my hat is off to them B^)
BTW, the only improvement I can think of in playability is when you allow users to pick up a stack with mixed suits and then make the tedious plays for them. When I pick up, say, a 5 of clubs with a 4 of hearts on it, I would like to be able to drop the 5 on any free 6 and have the 4 stay on the 5. I think that is the move I want to do at least 4 out of 5 times.
Anyway, thanks for the great work! I am most impressed with Green Felt!
Dave
We do not have that feature. I generally find our undo fast enough that I can get back to where I want before losing my train of thought, but I rarely come back after days without outright starting over. What UI do you envision for this? Anything more complex than a "Checkpoint" button and a "Restore to Checkpoint" button?
You are correct that the leader board only shows the "shuffle of the day". You can play as many times as you like, but we only show the first time you got a given score. There are multiple ways around this like closing your browser window before finishing, not actually finishing but getting close, playing anonymously and then logging in after you have won (yes this works). We've been meaning to work around some of these, but they are not a high priority.
That's a fine idea. We do support that kind of move in Forty Thieves. I'll think about it.
-Jim
What I envisioned for my PC based game is to export my history to files named 1234a.hst, where 1234 is the seed for that layout, "a" being the first one I save. If I find another path that seems interesting (and I feel I would have trouble reproducing it) I save that history to 1234b.hst, and so forth. When I run into a brick wall, I import one of my history files, or start over. It is amazing how may paths there can be in spider.
What you could do with a web based game, I don't know, but I can say I have ended up near the top of the alphabet before solving some of the more difficult layouts. I would also say that I haven't encountered an unsolvable one in nearly ten years of playing my game. It is the thing that I found fascinating about spider - I have managed to find solutions for seemingly impossible layouts and in fact nearly rejected spider after implementing it originally - thinking it *was* impossible most of the time until I figured out how to beat it.
Anyway, I'm not sure my style of spider playing would fit in with what you have done here, but it was nice to find a place where people are into spider (and my other favorites - seahaven towers and calculation B^)
Dave
Looking for an opportunity to feel special by solving a previously unsolved Spider, I searched the forum and found this thread. Dave never reported whether he solved Spider #365873702, and the high score was empty, so I thought I'd try to find out myself whether that deal is winnable. It turned out that it is, in case anyone else is interested.
What I think is really helpful, especially with difficult deals like this one, is making a record of the face-down cards and, whenever I uncover one, writing down its value. This makes it possible to plan ahead when deciding which column to work your way down, which can probably save a lot of time later in the game when the tableau has become a mess due to the cards from the stock and working your way down to the face-down cards in a column is a challenge in and of itself.
Well, that's that loose end tied up. Learning that almost all Spider games are winnable has somehow sparked an obsession in me to hunt down Spider games that others have given up on, pretty much as Dave described his attitude towards the game, except that I'm terrified of not being able to win the game but not being able to prove that it is unwinnable either (demonstrably unwinnable Spider games exist).
Hi, this is Dave again B^)
The reason that I never pursued "unbeatable" Spider games on this site is that I found I don't have enough time to work on them and no way to save games at different points as I can in my version (as described above). I sometimes have 10 minutes to kill and try a different path on a game I am stuck on and occasionally stumble on to something promising that I then save for later. It is amazing how quickly I will find I can't reproduce a path if I forget to save....
I, too, have become fairly obsessed with Spider and my game hasn't produced a "demonstrably unwinnable" layout in over a decade of playing it, though it's fairly obvious that unsolvable layouts can exist. I just wonder when I will run into one using my random deck generator...AND how I will tell it is unsolvable B^) I swear it took me close to 6 months to solve one (though I did give up on it for a while before going back to it some months later) It still amazes me that I solved that one B^)
If I could import layouts from Greenfelt to my program, it would be interesting to try some of the hard ones here, but I never implemented my "input deck" feature - and would have to get Jim to give me an "export deck" feature on Greenfelt B^)
Dave
Hi Schamschi (and Dave if you're still around),
I'm glad to see you beat the formerly unsolvable game! I also verified that no anonymous players have beaten it either (they wouldn't show up for you), though
one person (plum) tried for three times as long as it took you to beat it.
I repeated my previous search to see if any recent spider Game of the Day's had gone un-won. It looks like the least-won in the last 90 days is this spider game which only 11 people beat.
I'll try attempt to query for even older harder shuffles once our off-line query server is back in action.
Thanks for following up!
-Jim
Yes, Spider can be very time consuming, so a save feature might definitely help. Maybe it would be possible to implement using user specific cookies or something.
By the way, Dave, if you're obsessed with solving seemingly unsolvable Spiders, I have the just the game for you, however, it's from a downloadable solitaire software (free) and not a game from here. In this game, I managed to get four (!) sequences out of play (one of each suit) while having one empty column, but I still couldn't win it. I can't imagine that this game is winnable, but I can't prove that it is not.
And Jim, speaking of unsolved Games of the Day, it would be great if you could check whether there are any unsolved Calculation Games of the Day. It's also a game I like, and up until now, I could solve every one I came across. And unlike with Spider, I am not as terrified of not being able to win one. I don't know why, maybe it's because Calculation doesn't take as long to play as Spider because it's more straightforward.
Ah, yes, Calculation one of my other favorites! I discovered it as a kid and was pleased to find a solitaire game of skill rather than luck. When I was writing my solitaire engine I was thinking of Calculation as my main goal, but it was Spider that grabbed me most. I think I estimated (when I was 12 or so) that I could solve Calculation maybe 25 percent of the time (of course that was with a deck of cards, LONG before computer solitaire games B^). Now that I have been playing it here, I see that it is almost always solvable but occasionally not. This site provides enough proof of that for me since there are a lot of dedicated players and surely one will find a way if there is one! I would say there have only been a handful of ones that nobody got since I started here a couple of years ago.
That brings me to my other favorite - Seahaven Towers. I found that on a Silicon Graphics workstation back in the early 90's that my company had. The thing about that version was if you gave up, it didn't count the game as a loss for you until it checked to see if the layout was solvable. If it wasn't, you didn't get dinged, so there was some pressure not to give up trying until you were sure you were wasting your time. I thought that was a great feature, but after playing here for awhile, I'm not convinced the "solver" was accurate because I seem to remember it declaring more layouts unsolvable than is the case here, where the solving is done by thousands (?) of players around the world. I actually tried to code a solver into my game and failed miserably, so it seems like a pretty difficult thing to do programmatically, but why bother when you have a wide world of players to do the work for you B^) I would love to know if the solver on the Silicon Graphics version accurately found solutions or not. Maybe their layout generator produced more hard layouts - who knows (unless the author is still lurking out there and could enlighten me B^)
Oh yeah, you didn't mention which solitaire generates the Spider game you think is not winnable. I could give it a try, but if it doesn't let you save or has limited undo/redo it might be pretty hard to do anything with it. Spider has an amazing number of paths you can take with any given layout.
Dave
The horror Spider I'm talking about is from PySol, game #10957. PySol has complete undo/redo and you can also save a game. Game #10957 is the only Spider from the first 32000 that hasn't been won besides #14934 and #1748, but these two can be proven to be unwinnable by showing that every column contains a card that cannot be moved. But this is not the case in #10957, because it's possible to clear a column there.
That looks like a pretty ugly layout! I haven't cleared a column in my first few tries, but I'll give it a go. Thanks!
Dave
P.S. I didn't notice how you would know what games have been solved. Is there a community like here that shares results?
Oh yes, it's absolutely horrible. And there always seems to be one card or suit alteration too many or one empty space too few. Maybe a game of Spider simply can be unwinnable even if it's possible to clear a column (because a game being unwinnable from a position where four sequences are already out of play has got to be some kind of record).
And no, it's not a community who solved all the other Spiders, just someone who wrote a Spider solver and unleashed it on the 32000 Spiders. It's documented here, and the page also contains the layout of the unwon games (including the stock and the face-down cards), if that helps.
Wow! a Spider solver! I gave up on a Seahaven Towers solver and Spider has orders of magnitude more options. I am truly impressed!
Dave
Yeah, it's quite an achievement. I tried to write a brute-force Spider solver myself, but gave up on it because it was just unrealistic. Judging by the comments in the downloadable zip archive, the author worked quite some time on it.
I found two unsolved spider games-of-the-day from the last year.
Thanks Jim! I'll have a look at them. The first one already looks horrifying, with five 10s and no possible moves in the beginning.
Spiders #4142159856 and #1622024362 are no longer unsolved. I didn't finish the first one in one sitting though, so the time there is meaningless. And although the initial layout of the first Spider looked far more intimidating than that of the second one, solving the second Spider somehow was less fun, probably because the second game was much more of a mess almost until the end, or at least it seemed like it.
Now that we got these Spiders out of the way, did you find any unsolved Calculation games, Jim?
Max, (I'm guessing you're the Maximillian from the "winnable spider" site)
The spider layout you pointed me to (in psysol) looks pretty unwinnable since there are precious few options anywhere during the deals. I managed to get one column down to one card but couldn't clear it. I've never seen one that bad and, well, I guess I'm not that obsessed to spend more time on it B^)
It was nice to see that 99.991 was the estimate on the precentage of winnable layouts since I haven't run into one yet in my game. When I get to 10,000 games played I'll start to worry about my random deck generator B^)
You seem to be more obsessed/skilled than I am - I tip my hat! My obsession has been spread out for more than ten years in small increments. I really use these interesting solitaire games as relaxation and exercises in calming my mind when faced with a seemingly impossible task.
Dave