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Freecell
FreeCell is a solitaire card game played using the standard 52-card deck. It is fundamentally different from most solitaire games in that very few deals are unsolvable, and all cards are dealt face-up from the beginning of the game. Microsoft has included a FreeCell computer game with every release of the Windows operating system since 1995, which has greatly contributed to the game's popularity. Rules One standard 52-card deck is used. There are four open cells and four open foundations. Cards are dealt face-up into eight cascades, four of which comprise seven cards each and four of which comprise six cards each. The top card of each cascade begins a sequence. Tableaus must be built down by alternating colors. Foundations are built up by suit. The Foundations begin with Ace and are built up to King. Any cell card or top card of any cascade may be moved to build on a tableau, or moved to an empty cell, an empty cascade, or its foundation. The game is won after all ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microsoft FreeCell
FreeCell, also known as Microsoft FreeCell, is a computer game included in Microsoft Windows, based on a card game with the same name. It is one of the most widely used Windows programs, estimated to be ahead of Word and Microsoft Excel. It has been included with every release of the Windows operating system since 1995, which has greatly contributed to the original game's popularity. Development Paul Alfille implemented Freecell in 1978 for the PLATO computer system at CERL; by the early 1980s Control Data Corporation had published it for all PLATO systems. Jim Horne, who enjoyed playing Freecell on the PLATO system at the University of Alberta, published a shareware $10 DOS version with color graphics in 1988. That year Horne joined Microsoft, and later ported the game to Windows. The Windows version was first included in Microsoft Entertainment Pack Volume 2 and later the Best Of Microsoft Entertainment Pack. It was subsequently included with Win32s as an application tha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Baker's Game
Baker's Game is a patience or solitaire card game similar to FreeCell. It predates FreeCell, and differs from it only in the fact that sequences are built by suit, instead of by alternate color. This makes the game more difficult to complete successfully. History One of the oldest ancestors of Baker's Game is Eight Off. In the June 1968 edition of ''Scientific American'', Martin Gardner described in his "Mathematical Games" column a game by C. L. Baker, that is now known as Baker's Game. Gardner wrote "The game was taught to Baker by his father, who in turn learned it from an Englishman during the 1920s". The description of Baker's Game in the "Mathematical Games" column inspired Paul Alfille to create FreeCell and he coded it for the PLATO educational computer system, which ended up becoming more popular than Baker's Game. Rules (Adapted from the FreeCell's article Rules.) Construction and layout: *One standard 52-card deck is used. *There are four open cells and four ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Penguin (solitaire)
Penguin is a patience or solitaire card game, invented by David Parlett, which uses a deck of 52 playing cards. The game play is similar to solitaire card games like the popular Freecell and its predecessor Eight Off. Rules The cards are dealt from left to right into seven columns, each with seven rows. The first card dealt is called the "beak" (in the example, the five of spades). When the three other cards with the same rank appear, they are immediately placed on the foundations, and the next card dealt takes its place in the tableau so that no empty spaces appear. The object of the game is to build the foundations up in suit up to the card that is a rank lower than the beak. For example, if the beak is a five, the last card of each foundation should be a four; if it is an ace, the last card of each foundation should be a king. The cards on the tableau are built down by suit. Cards are moved one at a time, unless a suit sequence of cards is formed, which can be moved as a un ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PLATO (computer System)
PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), also known as Project Plato and Project PLATO, was the first generalized computer-assisted instruction system. Starting in 1960, it ran on the University of Illinois's ILLIAC I computer. By the late 1970s, it supported several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Many modern concepts in multi-user computing were first developed on PLATO, including forums, message boards, online testing, email, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer video games. PLATO was designed and built by the University of Illinois and functioned for four decades, offering coursework (elementary through university) to UIUC students, local schools, prison inmates, and other universities. Courses were taught in a range of subjects, including Latin, chemistry, education, music, Esperanto, and primary mathematics. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stalactites (solitaire)
Stalactites is a solitaire card game which uses a deck of 52 playing cards. The game is similar to Freecell, but differs in the way that cards are built onto the foundations and packed on the tableau. It has just two cells, and most games are winnable with good play. Stalactites was invented by Albert Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith for their 1950 treatise on patience games and given the alternative names of Old Mole and Grampus.Morehead & Mott-Smith (1950), p. 19. Rules The player deals four cards from the deck. These four cards form the foundations. They are turned sideways (although it is not necessary to do so). The rest of the cards are dealt into eight columns of six cards each on the tableau. These cards can only be built up on the foundations regardless of suit and they cannot be built on each other. Before the game starts, the player can decide on how the foundations should be built. Building can be either in ones (A-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-J-Q-K) or in twos (A-3-5-7-9-J ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eight Off
Eight Off is a patience or solitaire card game, named after its employment of eight cells, played with one deck of playing cards. The object of the game is to move all the cards into the foundations. It served as a partial inspiration for and is very similar to the popular solitaire game FreeCell."Eight Off" (p.201) in ''Hoyle's Rules of Games'' (3rd edition) by Philip D. Morehead (ed.), 2001. Rules The cards are dealt, face up, into eight columns (or piles) of six cards each. (These eight columns make up the tableau.) The remaining four cards go into the first four cells. When dealt, the table should bear some resemblance to the picture on the right, although a layout with the cells on the left and the foundations at the top is another option. The eight slots along the top of the picture represent the cells. These cells can be used to temporarily store any available card from the table. Four of the cells are filled at the beginning of the game. The four slots along the lef ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scorpion (solitaire)
Scorpion is a patience or solitaire card game using a deck of 52 playing cards. Although somewhat related to Spider, the method of game play is akin to Yukon. The object of this game is to form four columns of suit sequence cards from king down to ace. Gameplay The game starts with 49 cards dealt into seven columns of seven cards each on the tableau. The first four columns each have three face-down cards with four face-up cards placed over them. The cards in the remaining three columns are all faced up. The three leftover cards are set aside for later. Cards in the tableau are built down by suit and every face up card is available for play, no matter where in the column it is. That means that any card can be placed on top of a card that is a rank higher. Once a card from the bottom or middle of a column is moved, all cards on top of it are moved as well, as one unit. Nothing can be placed on an ace and gaps on the tableau can only be taken by kings or sequences with Kings as the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
NP-complete
In computational complexity theory, NP-complete problems are the hardest of the problems to which ''solutions'' can be verified ''quickly''. Somewhat more precisely, a problem is NP-complete when: # It is a decision problem, meaning that for any input to the problem, the output is either "yes" or "no". # When the answer is "yes", this can be demonstrated through the existence of a short (polynomial length) ''solution''. # The correctness of each solution can be verified quickly (namely, in polynomial time) and a brute-force search algorithm can find a solution by trying all possible solutions. # The problem can be used to simulate every other problem for which we can verify quickly that a solution is correct. Hence, if we could find solutions of some NP-complete problem quickly, we could quickly find the solutions of every other problem to which a given solution can be easily verified. The name "NP-complete" is short for "nondeterministic polynomial-time complete". In this name, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brute-force Search
In computer science, brute-force search or exhaustive search, also known as generate and test, is a very general problem-solving technique and algorithmic paradigm that consists of Iteration#Computing, systematically checking all possible candidates for whether or not each candidate satisfies the problem's statement. A brute-force algorithm that finds the divisors of a natural number ''n'' would enumerate all integers from 1 to n, and check whether each of them divides ''n'' without remainder. A brute-force approach for the eight queens puzzle would examine all possible arrangements of 8 pieces on the 64-square chessboard and for each arrangement, check whether each (queen) piece can attack any other. While a brute-force search is simple to implement and will always find a solution if it exists, implementation costs are proportional to the number of candidate solutionswhich in many practical problems tends to grow very quickly as the size of the problem increases (#Combinatorial ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Factorial
In mathematics, the factorial of a non-negative denoted is the Product (mathematics), product of all positive integers less than or equal The factorial also equals the product of n with the next smaller factorial: \begin n! &= n \times (n-1) \times (n-2) \times (n-3) \times \cdots \times 3 \times 2 \times 1 \\ &= n\times(n-1)!\\ \end For example, 5! = 5\times 4! = 5 \times 4 \times 3 \times 2 \times 1 = 120. The value of 0! is 1, according to the convention for an empty product. Factorials have been discovered in several ancient cultures, notably in Indian mathematics in the canonical works of Jain literature, and by Jewish mystics in the Talmudic book ''Sefer Yetzirah''. The factorial operation is encountered in many areas of mathematics, notably in combinatorics, where its most basic use counts the possible distinct sequences – the permutations – of n distinct objects: there In mathematical analysis, factorials are used in power series for the ex ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Patience (game)
Patience (Europe), card solitaire, or solitaire (US/Canada), is a genre of card games whose common feature is that the aim is to arrange the cards in some systematic order or, in a few cases, to pair them off in order to discard them. Most are intended for play by a single player, but there are varieties for two or more players. Genre names 'Patience' is the earliest recorded name for this type of card game in both British and American sources. The word derives from the games being seen as an exercise in patience.Parlett (1991), pp. 157–161. Although the name solitaire became common in North America for this type of game during the 20th century, British games scholar David Parlett argues that there are good reasons for preferring the name 'patience'. Firstly, ''patience'' refers specifically to card games, whereas ''solitaire'' may also refer to games played with dominoes or peg and board games. Secondly, any game of patience may be played competitively by two or more players ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Klondike (solitaire)
Klondike is a card game for one player and the best known and most popular version of the patience or solitaire family, as well as one of the most challenging in widespread play.Parlett (1979), pp. 94–95. It has spawned numerous variants including Batsford, Easthaven, King Albert, Thumb and Pouch, Somerset or Usk and Whitehead, as well as the American variants of the games, Agnes and Westcliff. The distinguishing feature of all variants is a triangular layout of the tableau, building in ascending sequence and packing in descending order.Coops (1939), p. 10. Name In the U.S. and Canada, it is so well known that the term "Solitaire", in the absence of qualifiers, typically refers to Klondike. Equally in the UK, it is often just known as "Patience". Elsewhere the game is known as American Patience. Historically, Klondike was also called Canfield in America, perhaps because it was a casino game at the Canfield Casino in Saratoga Springs, New York; this is the name by which it be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
