I haven't posted in a while but this project will never die until I'm dead. I can usually put a few hours a month on it and the payback is great. I got an email from another computer solver and his program is solving at 83.6% on a thousand deals. His results can be found here along with his source code:
https://github.com/ShootMe/Klondike-Solver/blob/master/Statistics.txt
His program gives up after 60 million states so his deal processing rate is much higher than mine. 8.2 seconds a deal versus my 19 seconds a deal (hardware considerations aside). Here are my results on a thousand games I ran today as a comparison:
80.2% solved. Roughly 19 seconds on average to process a deal. Some deals are ridiculously difficult to process. I've seen some take about 10 minutes before they become unsolvable.
Why the discrepancy? If we have bugs in either of our programs, that would certainly result in the discrepancy. Another potential problem is generating random numbers. I use stl:mersenne_twister and he used his home grown version to generate numbers. I'll try his random number generator. I asked him to try stl:mersenne_twister.
I'm working on making my solver interactive and hope to have it ready to post in a month or two. This will be a fully interactive installable program that you can play Klondike Solitaire on (draw 3, infinite retries). In addition, you will be able to ask the computer to attempt to solve any given deal that you lost and allow you to step through the solution. In addition, you'll be able to have the computer make a move at any given time in the game. Undo/Redo functionality to back up and go forward on moves. Version 2 or the end product will model after Dr. BlackJack. You can have it warn you when the computer thinks you are making a mistake. I don't have a lot of time to spend on this but surprisingly, I've made quite a bit of progress on it just looking at it a few hours a month.
