2 comments

  • advisedwang 1 hour ago
    Per [1] (found via wikipedia) 35% is possible!

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

  • reenorap 1 hour 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 1 hour 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...

      • bluedino 7 minutes ago
        The current version, you can play on 'Easy', I think my kindergartner wins all his games on that setting.
      • dezgeg 8 minutes ago
        Could there be mixup with FreeCell?
      • InitialLastName 1 hour 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 38 minutes 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.

          • npinsker 20 minutes ago
            It’s quite doable, if you don’t mind culling some winnable games too. The object isn’t to have a perfect classifier.
    • embedding-shape 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.