Solitaire simulator for finding the best strategy: Current record is 8.590%

advisedwang•about 2 hours ago

Per [1] (found via wikipedia) 35% is possible!

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210924183919/https://www.aaai....

reenorap•about 2 hours ago

Isn't 8.5% low?

My mom didn't use the computer much except she did play solitaire on her Windows laptop all the time. She had over a 2000 game win streak until she got dementia and stopped using the computer altogether.

fishtoaster•about 2 hours ago

Winning 2000 games in a row sounds statistically unlikely unless the Windows version of solitaire does something behind the scenes to make the game more winnable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_(solitaire)#Probabili...

InitialLastName•about 2 hours ago

I suspect that the later (Win 7+) versions of Windows solitaire (and minesweeper, for that matter) did, in fact, cull the unwinnable games.

jasperry•about 1 hour ago

I don't know of any algorithm to cull non-winnable Klondike games. Playing deal-1 instead of deal-3, and with unlimited flipping of the stock, the win chance is probably close to 50%, but that still makes 2000 in a row statistically impossible.

My guess is that the poster's mom was actually playing FreeCell, in which nearly every game is winnable and people do get streaks like that.

bluedino•about 1 hour ago

The current version, you can play on 'Easy', I think my kindergartner wins all his games on that setting.

dezgeg•about 1 hour ago

Could there be mixup with FreeCell?

bluefirebrand•about 1 hour ago

It wouldn't be that difficult to make computer solitaire winnable 100% of the time actually. It would mean "cheating" by moving cards around behind the scenes though

There's an assumption with computer card games that the computer shuffles the deck once just like a real card game but that doesn't have to be true on the computer if you don't want it to be

Now, any reasonable player would notice if you reshuffle the deck in solitaire, but you could swap around the face down cards without any problem. You could have just one stack of face down cards in memory and always pop from the top when a card is flipped

Edit: Maybe this wouldn't be winnable 100%, but you could certainly nudge every hand towards being winnable

embedding-shape•about 2 hours ago

Similarly, my half-sister's mother was almost allergic to anything technology, except for to play Solitaire, which she did every single day. I think many of the games offer configurable "difficulty" though, there are modes where it's guaranteed to be solvable for example. And most of them surely are made slightly easier by default.

With a randomly shuffled real deck, wouldn't surprise me that it would be ~10%,.

InitialLastName•about 2 hours ago

Draw 1 is much more winnable than draw 3. With perfect knowledge (or an infinite undo stack), evidently ~80% of Klondike games are winnable. With imperfect knowledge but good strategy, humans win about 11% of draw 3 games. So given they have implemented a more rudimentary strategy (first come, first serve), 8.5% doesn't seem that low.

Solitaire simulator for finding the best strategy: Current record is 8.590%

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