Calculation getting more popular?
dbwoerner
REGISTERED
Judging from how I am more regularly getting booted off the to ten list, it looks like Calculation is getting more popular! I have mixed feelings about that B^) It might be nice to get it included in the leader board, though that might attract more of the speed demon types....or do you think Calculation is harder to get the <10 sec crazy times?
dbwoerner
Comments
Don't look at me, I can't figure Calculation out, let alone get in the top ten scores... LOL
I'm not fast on any games (once in a while I get #1 spot, but lose it fast). And calculation is beyond my abilities. No clue why the upsurge lol
I had the advantage of liking the game as a kid. At the time I thought it was the only solitaire game that was a game of skill rather than chance and thought I could win maybe 3 in10 games. That was with a deck of cards so undo was not seriously available B^) Computer Calculation made it clear that most games are solvable. Most of the other solitaire games here fill up the leader boards with ten wins pretty quickly. I used to be able to make the top ten most of the time since most games had fewer than ten people who solved and I don't try to improve my times to stay visible to the world on the top ten list. Anyway, it's a great game and I try to play one every day...
Dave
Alright ...so...you got me playing. And while I'm scoring high, I'm not completing the game. Is there a strategy in stacking the cards you can't use right away?
You try to arrange the discards so that they will play in order on one of the four piles. Also you usually have to keep a discard pile clear for a King - since that leaves only three piles it can get pretty tricky. Then you try to build on the King pile in reverse (QJ109, J975, etc). I almost always reserve a pile for Kings and the corresponding reverse cards, though some of the difficult ones require some creative stacking. When you get stuck it's because you have all of some card buried that is needed to play the cards coming up in the deal. Believe me, it's alot harder with a real deck of cards B^)
If you want to try a game that seems impossible, but is actually quite solvable, that would be Spider. Unfortunately it can take hours to figure it out and I don't have that kind of time.....
Yep that's about right, leave a space for king. I quite like calculation, I especially like it because it is not on the leader board
I have mixed feelings about that. I'm also a Seahaven Towers fan and if I'm busy for a few days, I can go back to the leader board and play the games I've missed. On the other hand, with Calculation I stand a chance to be in the top ten due presumably to its isolation from the speedsters. It seems like you can still figure out a Calculation game and then go back and run it for speed, but it doesn't look like it happens as often there....
Today's Calculation is pretty hard - let's see if I stay on the list for this on. I'm second of two people that have solved it for now. B^)
As far as I can tell, this is THE skill game. When I was a kid I'd win maybe 1 out of 20 or 30 games. I'm guessing I win 85+ percent of the time now. You build backwards on all 4 piles (for each sequence) and plan for a variety of points in the sequence where you may have to switch the sequence from one pile to another (usually moving left to right). When you combine playing both forward to the foundations and this type of "backward" play, the odds really go up. You have to know what cards have yet to come up and reduce the number of potential killer cards (outstanding cards that would lock your access to a pile regardless of where you play it). Though I win most of the time, it takes upwards of 10 minutes to do all the necessary planning. I'm amazed at how quickly some of you win the game!
I find I need a degree in philosophy to understand the rules of some of these games I'll probably leave it to the better players.Hav'nt given up on Freecell yet.Still persevering.Plod on.
Yeah, Calculation was the only Solitaire game I would play as a kid because it was a game of skill. It seemed to be a natural for computer solitaire games with unlimited undo/redo!
I also like Seahaven Towers and Spider, two other games of the genre I like to call "Puzzle Solitaire".
I started playing Seahaven Towers when I found a version on a Silicon Graphics workstation years ago and still like to play it here. The SGI version had a great feature where, if the layout was unsolvable, it wouldn't count it as a fail for your scoring history if you gave up. This added the incentive to keep trying even though you thought it was impossible. If you gave up, the program would go off and try to solve it - and then rub your nose in it when it found a solution B^) Of couse here you have the crowd to show you whether or not the layout is solvable - someone somewhere is guaranteed to find the solution...
I discovered Spider when I was looking around for games to add to the solitaire program I wrote back in the nineties. At first I thought it was completely hopeless, but then after finally solving one, I kept trying and found that almost all are in fact solvable - though some of the solutions are ridiculously complicated and took me months to find. The Spider here is good, but it is pretty much impossible for me to solve in less than a half hour (the speedsters seem to be able to manage in under ten minutes - a far cry from the under ten seconds of other games B^)