Addiction

Probably the best piece of hardware that I got my hands on recently was the Nokia E71. With it came the knowledge of the Symbian OS (S60), and the revelation that behind its quite non-sexy UI there's a Unix-ish openness to it. Then came the downfall: I installed FreeCell on the damn thing :P.

Not wanting to ruin the keyboard and joystick with action gaming (I need _some_ type of game to play while waiting in line for stuff) like I did with my last phone, I opted for a strategy game. Which became a minor (uh?) addiction. So minor that today I was only mildly inclined to search the interwebs for a freakin' FreeCell solver to convince myself that my current game was unsolvable. Aha! It wasn't :( Anyway at least that humbled me a bit, allowed me to cheat (to save time!) and presented me with some new build environments (ccmake anyone?). The project I'm talking about is Freecell Solver, and here's the game I needed help with (just to save time!):

QD  7H  QH  3C KH 2C 8S
8C  5H  AH  5D AD JH KC
5C  5S  9C  4D QC 8H 6D
AC  3D  7D  KS JS 7S JC
10D 10H 10S 3S KD 9H
4S  9S  4H  8D 6H 2H
10C QS  6S  6C 4C JD
3H  2D  2S  7C 9D AS

Try something like fc-solve -m -snx < <filename> to solve it. If you need to save even more time than I did ;) here's the solution:

8h 3a 4b 43 a3 4c 4d 41 4a 4h
74 a7 18 1h 1a 1h b1 12 1b c1
85 4c b4 58 4b d4 14 7d 7h 71
78 c7 1c b1 c1 5b 75 b7 75 27v3
2c 2h 2b 2h 6h b8 2b 25 b1 15
3b 32 31 c3 b2 6c 26 32v2 3b 13
d1 63 1d a1 21 d2 36 3a 3d b3
36 3h c3 63 2b a2 62 6c 6a c6
32 3c d3 63 6d b6 68 c6 3b 3c
b3 6b c6 3c a3 85 3a b3 23 6b
d6 c6 58 26 36 3d a3 85 3c b3
23 c2 58 2a d2 63 2b 51 5c 5d
52 53 d2 c2 1d 1h 5c 57 c2 65
54 82 8h 8h 8h 8h 3h 2h 3h 2h
3h 2h 3h 2h 3h 2h 2h 4h 2h 4h
2h 4h 2h 4h 2h 4h 2h 4h ah dh
bh 1h 3h 1h 3h 1h 1h 7h 1h 7h
1h 7h 1h 7h

This game is solveable.
Total number of states checked is 9510.
This scan generated 9606 states.

BTW is it just me or is the board layout for fc-solve in CxL notation instead of LxC notation? I keep having to turn my head 90 degrees to make sense of it. And then I can't read the codes :P.