9 Jul 2002 shlomif   » (Master)

Freecell Solver

Adrian Ettlinger, the main developer of Freecell Pro managed to cause the Freecell Solver engine to crash in some reproducible conditions. It took me a lot of time to figure out where the problem was, but valgrind finally came to the rescue. It turned out I did not initialize one of the variables in a place I should have initialized it. But now it fixed and I released a new stable version.

Right now, Freecell Pro has been released with a "Solver Evalutation Edition" that contains my solver, the original Woods-Callan-Ettlinger solver, and Tom Holroyd's Patsolve. Adrian claims that Freecell Solver is the fastest one, but it naturally has problems of reporting false negatives.

Other than I am now working on getting the optimization scan to work for atomic moves, and to build a good meta-scan for them. Measuring the performance of all the scans for all the boards takes a very long time, especially for atomic moves. I can parallelize it by timing each scan on a different computer, but I only have one computer accessible at home.

Studies

I handed out my SICP test. The lecturer came to the Technion quite late and I had become quite worried because I could not find him, but I was finally able to find him and hand him my exam.

I had the "Design and Analysis of Algorithms" test on Sunday. It went well enough, but I have yet to find out what my grade is. The things that remain on the agenda are my "Computer Graphics" test on the 23rd, and the project. Roy has a test this Friday, so we will only be able to sit next week.

Freecell Solver Book

So far, I have two subscribers on my book mailing list, and there is potentially another one. I have made quite a lot of progress writing down the book in DocBook/XML. However, I am now being slightly suspended because there seem to be some bugs in the PDF rendering.

I'm sure I'll be able to resolve them eventually, but it is still annoying.

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