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How Windows FreeCell Gave Rise To Online Crowdsourcing
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."
I can figure out how to solve Free Cell...
(scrambles back to Spider Solitaire)
In real life, with real mines. Terrible results. While we did find most of the mines, it turns out that people are terrible at safely locating them. Lots of dead bodies, limbs, etc, everywhere.
It doesn't look like he ever proved that the hand in question was not solvable. It only claims that by having many human players try to solve it and several different AI approaches, that it was never solved.
The article ends by implying that this was a victory, because the outcome of all 32,000 hands is now known. But, as far as I can tell, one hand is still undecided!
Free unix account: freeshell.org
FTFA:
So when that final push on No. 11,982—an effort aided by humans and even a handful of game-solving programs—met with failure, Ring celebrated. Is every hand in FreeCell winnable? No. Thirty-one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine hands are winnable. And one isn’t. He proved that.
No he didn't. Unless the exploration of the game space was exhaustive, there's no proof. A bunch of people playing the game and failing to solve it isn't a proof.
The only way to "prove" it would be to identify a definitive proving mechanism, and nobody has done so. No computer simulations have been able to solve it, nor have any participants. That's going to be as good as it gets.
No, the first large distributed project is the Cunnigham project:
http://books.google.com/books?id=udr3tHHwBl0C&lpg=PA375&ots=s4GNA3LkQo&pg=PA375
that started in 1949 on the ENIAC !
And this project is still ongoing.
In fact, this search started with human efforts, so it was already heavily crowd-sourced since a least 3 centuries.
The culmination of the manual effort came in 1903, when Frank Nelson Cole showed that:
193,707,721 × 761,838,257,287 = 2^67 - 1
It took 3 years of Sundays to discover.
http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article030105.html
This was also done at about the same time in the UK, by a group of people on Cix (a CoSy conferencing system), with the same conclusion, except we found two more unsolvable ones that I suspect the American team didn't look at: -1 and -2. For what it's worth, I invented the notation we used to document solutions, and one of the team produced a solver that exhaustively checked the game space for 11 982 and indeed found it impossible. So give or take formal proof of the solver's correctness, it is proven that not all games are solvable.
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My mom did this during the 80s by herself. She had a (very) little list of which deals she couldn't solve. I wonder how many other people have done the same.
She still goes through 20 deals every day but with the new version she knows she'll never finish.
In ye olde England, Stone Soup was the first 'crowd sourcing' project. Whenever I read these 'first' summaries all I think is the shoulders of giants, this one experiment.
Just thought I'd mention that the linux versions of freecell are all missing a key feature that the Windows version had: it told you the numeric seed used to generate the hand, and let you type it in again later if you wanted to play the same hand.
The linux versions I've seen will let you restart the game from the beginning, but don't let you save it, and sharing the game with someone else isn't as easy as just sending a number.