Solving rate down to 77%

I am down to 77% solving rate. My initial 80% is attributable to bugs that I have since fixed. It seems to be consistent but I really haven't built up a large sample set. We're talking hundreds of games.

My list of lists isn't doing exactly what I thought it was. I was incorrectly collecting statistics. The number of stacks in a given list is not limited at all and grows quite large. Computational power is an issue.

I took a shot at trying to calculate how many ways a game can be solved. This is a really small sample set and some deals couldn't finish as you run out of memory. Running 32 bit, my process is limited to 2 gig. This little foray led to me to following conclusions:

1. My card object is too large. For this reason, I encoded everything into a single byte. The card is encoded in the low order nibble, the suit is encoded into the next two bits and the up card state is encoded in the high order bit. Stacks are much smaller now and stack comparisons are much faster.
2. I need to port this to 64 bit. 2 gig has no chance of dealing with this problem.
3. Even then, I will probably have to implement a caching scheme for writing stacks to disk.
4. I need to go multi-threaded and run this thing on eight cores.
5. I need to implement a twelve key map which uses the number of cards on all the stacks as the keys.
6. Make an internet solver. This would be a service that could be installed on computers where the main solver could dole out stacks to be solved. Sort of like the SETI at home thing. I'm certain there's a large community of people who would want to donate computing time in pursuit of meaningless endeavors like calculating the number of ways a deal can be won in solitaire! Er, uh, maybe not.
7. Utilize a database for caching stacks, managing solving and collecting statistics.

This little hobby is taking on more dimensions than unique solitaire card stacks. The funny thing is, I can probably chip away at this in my spare time with obsolete computer equipment. When I first started programming, 64K RAM and an 8 bit processor wouldn't have gotten you very far with this problem.