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How Windows FreeCell Gave Rise To Online Crowdsourcing

Posted by samzenpus on from the mastering-the-game dept.

TPIRman writes "In 1994, a physics doctoral student named Dave Ring assembled more than 100 math and puzzle enthusiasts on Usenet for what became one of the earliest online 'crowdsourcing' projects. Their goal: to determine if every hand in Windows' FreeCell solitaire game was in fact winnable, as the program's help file implied. Their efforts soon focused in on one incredibly stubborn hand: #11,982. They couldn't beat it, but in the process of trying, they proved the viability of an idea that would later be refined with crowdsourcing models like Amazon's Mechanical Turk."

2 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not solved != proof by tigre · · Score: 5, Informative

    Unless the exploration of the game space was exhaustive, there's no proof.

    Wikipedia claims that exhaustive search has been performed, assuming that the same hand numbering is used:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeCell#Impossible_games

  2. Re:No mathematical proof by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's a program that does it.

    http://kurage.nimh.nih.gov/tomh/public_html/archives/patsolve-3.0.tgz

    The program generates a list of axioms, followed by a list of transformations chosen from a finite set.

    After a finite number of steps, the proof reaches a conclusion that that game (and that's the only one
    out of the original 32000) is unsolvable. This is a real, valid mathematical proof. It's just very long
    and hard to read. But it is of finite size, and follows all the normal rules of mathematical proof.

    You're welcome to try to come up with a shorter proof.