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From: urlichs@smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Seahaven Tower Resource
Message-ID: <1990Mar18.204654.10798@smurf.sub.org>
Date: 18 Mar 90 20:46:54 GMT
References: <2082@gmdzi.UUCP> <12713@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: University of Karlsruhe, FRG
Lines: 30

In comp.sys.mac.programmer, article <12713@csli.Stanford.EDU>,
  wilson@csli.Stanford.EDU (Nathan Wilson) writes:
< krey@gmdzi.UUCP (Juergen Krey) writes:
< 
< >Hi! 
< >I enjoy playing the solitairy card game Seahaven Towers, and 
< >i want to know whether all initial configurations can be solved.
< 
< It's easy to come up with an intial configuration that is unsolvable.

Unsolvables are pretty common.

I just (for want of anything better to do) wrote a short MPW Pascal program
which did an exhaustive search of a given game to see if it could be solved.
Out of 10 games, two were unsolvable.

Since Seahaven has no way to get the card values out, or the moves in for that
matter, I didn't follow it up with a self-play mode and/or a larger data
sample to see what the actual percentage is.
Also, this was depth-first, and although I did put in some ideas on what moves
moves make more sense to try first, the resulting games were _awful_.

However, it sure is nice to know if a given game can be solved. Keeps you
from slaving away on one for days if the machine can tell you right away "no
go". ;-)
I probably still have it somewhere. On tape. Unfortuantely the tape drive was
eaten by its power supply two weeks ago. Anyone have a 150-MB Archive or TEAC
they want to part with?
-- 
Matthias Urlichs