pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.



cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

Or: I Learned To Play Solitaire At Nearly Age 34, Then Immediately Quit, Spit On Its Grave, And Declared It A Foolishness

Something that's important to know about me - and probably pretty hard to miss - is that I never did most things.


pendell
@pendell

Computer sorting/searching algorithm based on Klondike Solitaire.


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

While investigating (lightly) the winnability of Klondike I found myself wondering if this exists. It doesn't, as far as I can tell.

To be clear, I'm not counting the weird "web 1.0 style javascript" analytical site that's floating out there somewhere, or things of similarly academic nature. I want to go to "computer.cards" in my browser and watch the computer just play cards at medium-high speed without my input

next level option: a 9x9 grid of Klondike layouts fly onto my screen and all begin playing themselves, turning red and warping back in time every time they hit an unwinnable state, turning green when the algorithm has proven that they can be solved, then generating a new hand and repeating. lots of visual flair. total visual mess


pendell
@pendell
This post has content warnings for: bright flashing gif, epilepsy warning.

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

<imo>
I think a thing you're missing about the blank stare you describe with klondike ("Solitaire" in the coloquial sense) is that it's closer to mediation for many people, especially the sort of people "meditation doesn't work for" because it wasnt described to them in a way they could understand.

the winning never seems to matter, when i look at the age group that could be parents of thirty year olds, and much of gen x that followed them.

it's hard drive defragmentation, a way to occupy the fidgety and virtual brainparts so they can get out of the way, same way many of us use, dare i say, "higher brow video games". or photography, or whatever. it's tetris effect for people who a GUI just blew the minds of. it was accessible and it worked if it didn't frustrate you.

they aren't playing to win, the winning is, if anything, value neutral. they're restarting either way, because they're playing for the process
</imo>

but yeah as a game freecell is far superior. in ways that, i think, take away from the meditative potential

I gotta say: I fucking hate Freecell, and that is in no way the game's fault. My brain isn't wired for it, every card sitting out like that is just completely overwhelming to me. I could write a backtracking solver for it but I can't play it at all. My game is Tripeaks.

And I think part of the thing with Klondike that at least some people like, myself included, is that it is heavily chance-based. I'm pretty okay at it, and I like playing it sometimes as something I really can't be capital-g Good at If I Just Work Harder. You win or you don't and then you shuffle the deck again.

I view Klondike Solitaire as basically being Slot Machines With Extra Steps. While my play has some influence on the outcome of the game, it's 90% determined when I press the button to shuffle the deck, and the game itself is basically watching (with clicking) the cards fall into place to see if I've won.

Which is not to say that it's a good game, or even a "game" in the sense that freecell or chess or starcraft is. But, y'know, slot machines are popular. And the Extra Steps are transformative. It's got a place, Freecell has a place, they are in no way replacements for each other.

Don't get me wrong, there's no reason that slot machines should be appealing. It honestly seems like it's a bug in our wetware (around which have spun multiple billion-dollar industries).

It still makes me feel better to notice that two things that don't make sense resemble each other. If they're actually the same thing, that's a net-reduction in things which don't make sense!

What bothers me about it is that it's not pure chance. If it was either a "click the screen to see things move in an interesting algorithmic way, producing tiny hits of serotonin", or if it was a deterministic game where I knew I wasn't wasting my time, either would make sense to me. I don't understand what's appealing about the combination; something which you have to put thought into or you'll definitely lose, but even if you do, you have no idea whether it's accomplishing anything. I sorta get why folks are saying it's meditative, but... my brain just cannot cope with a task that may be pointless. This describes the root cause of an enormous swath of problems in my life.

I enjoy some games that combine skill and luck. Part of the fun is handling luck requires skill: making room for good luck to help, and controlling how bad luck hinders you. (I'm not really into Klondike, so I don't know how much of the skill/luck interplay it has.)

I view Klondike Solitaire as basically being Slot Machines With Extra Steps.

Yes, this is exactly right. IIRC, they had a "gambling mode" you could turn on to track your "winnings" Spoiler alert: You always lose lots of money. Klondike is designed to be unwinnable in the aggregate so you lose money.

i actually distinctly remember watching a friend play klondike with a physical deck of cards somewhere around grade 2, thinking “wow thats a cool idea”, trying it for myself back home and thinking “wow computers make a lot of stuff easier huh”

I had a similar reaction to Klondike—this makes no sense and I can lose through no fault of my own, so fuck this—and ended up falling in love with Eight Off, I think on one of my old Palms. Like FreeCell, every implementation I've ever seen is guaranteed winnable. The strategy, however, is pretty much the opposite of what you describe for FreeCell: I fare best (i.e., always win) when I play to clean up/organize the tableau, making sometimes horrifyingly tall stacks of ordered cards from King down to Ace, forgoing short-term deliveries that would lead to dead ends in favor of moves that make the space tidier and create (or at least conserve) opportunities.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

"make the computer play solitaire and just sit back and watch" is a concept i've thought about but not bothered to actually build. i think it'd go excellently with Gaps in particular, that's a very order out of chaos variant of solitaire

Kpatience, the KDE solitaire suite, has a solver. You can just click a button and the computer will solve the rest of the game wherever you are. It's not perfect, it gets stuck in loops sometimes, and it's definitely not guaranteed to win.

I'm quite fond of it and actually went through the hoops to get it running on Windows with WSL2 and x410 because I was rather addicted to Grandfather, one of the included games.

They've been through at least two major revisions of the solver that I can tell, and the reason I know that is that for a while, my Windows desktop was on a version that was obviously older than the one on my Linux laptop, and the CPU load difference was massive.

My Windows machine is a beefy MSI gaming laptop with a hexacore processor ... and Kpat's old solver would bring it to its knees. Fans screaming, CPU spiking, the works, just to be able to tell if the current tableau was solvable or not.

Meanwhile, my Linux laptop, a pokey old T460 with an i5 from like ten years ago, running the newer version on Arch, would happily run it quickly and quietly without even tripping the fan.

And I know it's not the OS, because later, the Ubuntu in my WSL2 finally updated the package, and now it runs just as smoothly. From watching the console logs, the older version seemed to do some pretty brute force methods of solving, but I guess someone found a more elegant way to do it.