Game Feature

Anonymous

Game: canfield
Game #: 3440909054

Dear Sirs, Some versions of Canfield offer a feature that lets you know that there are no more substantive move that can possibly be made. Such as a "Game Over" type notice. I would like to know if there is something like that available here, is there?

jim

Trina wrote:

Some versions of Canfield offer a feature that lets you know that there are no more substantive move that can possibly be made. Such as a "Game Over" type notice. I would like to know if there is something like that available here, is there?

Sorry Trina, we don't have "Game Over" detection because the game is never over as you can always Undo. I suppose that means we should have a "Don't Bother" type notice at the start if a particular shuffle can never be won.

Have Fun,
-Jim

Anonymous

Jim,

You just brought up one of my favorite features of a Seahaven towers game I used to play on a Silicon Graphics machine where I used to work. When you gave up on a game, the game would go off and figure out if the game was solvable and if it was, it would show you how - and if it wasn't, you didn't get penalized for giving up! It added a nice incentive to keep trying so that you wouldn't be embarrassed by giving up on a solvable board. I attempted to implement this sort of thing on my solitaire and found it was harder than I thought it would be to "computer solve" a game. You imply in your answer that you know when a board is unsolvable - do you?

Dave

david

dbwoerner wrote:

You just brought up one of my favorite features of a Seahaven towers game I used to play on a Silicon Graphics machine where I used to work. When you gave up on a game, the game would go off and figure out if the game was solvable and if it was, it would show you how - and if it wasn't, you didn't get penalized for giving up! It added a nice incentive to keep trying so that you wouldn't be embarrassed by giving up on a solvable board. I attempted to implement this sort of thing on my solitaire and found it was harder than I thought it would be to "computer solve" a game. You imply in your answer that you know when a board is unsolvable - do you?

We currently don't. We've looked at solvers before and the downside is they're pretty slow (since exhaustively searching all the moves is slow).

We've talked about only giving games that are solvable out, but the technique we currently favor is harnessing the power of our users instead of using solvers. That is, we can tell if a game is winnable by looking to see if anybody on the high score table has ever beat it. That means we can't actually tell when something is unsolvable (because we aren't really doing an exhaustive search), but knowing something is winnable is halfway there and way less computationally intensive (unless you count the distributed computing power of all the human brains playing the game :-)).

I do like the idea of a solver that can tell if something is impossible or not.

-David