Well, I was curious enough to click on your source code site and here is wahat I got: Forbidden You don't have permission to access /~shlomif/fcs/ on this server. Ho hum. Dan Feiglin Shlomi Fish wrote: > This is slightly off-topic but I thought it may be of interest to the > list. > > I wrote a program that automatically solves Freecell games. For those > who are not familiar with it, Freecell is a card game, in which there > are several stacks which should be moved to the decks with the aid of > freecells, which are cells that can hold one card each. > > In any case, the program operates by keeping record of the states for > which it checked whether they are solveable, so if the same state is > reached twice, it will only be checked once. (and thus also, it makes > sure there are no infinite loops). I wrote two versions of the program, > one which uses states where the representitive integers have widthes of > ints and shorts. And the second the integers are chars, and semi-chars. > (I use shifts and bit masks to get the card deck and card number). > > I noticed that the program that uses the chars representation runs much > faster than the int/short based program. For 100 given initial boards, > it finished them in 11 minutes and 12 seconds. The wider program took > more than 19 minutes when it was terminated in the middle of board No. > 62, which is a complex board that takes 42,940 checked states to > solution. > > The question is why the wide-integer based program is slower because > obviously my Pentium 166 MHz processor takes less time for 32-bit or > 16-bit integer computations and memory access than for 8-bit > ones. My best guess so far is that the majority of the time is spent > storing and searching for states, and because the char storage occupies > less space, that it is considerably faster. > > What do you think? > > You can download Freecell Solver and take a look at the source code > from the following URL: > > http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/fcs/ > > This is not going to be its permanent homepage, but I resorted to > putting it there because vipe.technion.ac.il has a momentary problem of > hosting the users' homepages. > > I discovered a few other insights while working on Freecell Solver. For > instance, I realized that one should not use qsort to insert a sort > margin into a sorted array, because it's quite slow. Instead, a > binary-search based merging function should be used. > > Another curious thing is that the program runs differently on Windows > NT than it does on i386 Linux and SPARC Solaris. On IRIX 64-bit it runs > differnetly than both of the above. I still don't know what's the cause > of this behaviour but I'm investigating it. > > Best regards, > > Shlomi Fish > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ > Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > The prefix "God Said" has the extraordinary logical property of > converting any statement that follows it into a true one. > > ================================================================= > To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with > the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command > echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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