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reenorapyesterday at 6:05 PM5 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

InitialLastNameyesterday at 6:18 PM

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.

fishtoasteryesterday at 6:17 PM

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...

show 6 replies
embedding-shapeyesterday at 6:16 PM

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%,.

dacracotyesterday at 9:35 PM

Yes, it is low, but that is the challenge to fork the repo and up the winning percentage.

stronglikedanyesterday at 9:36 PM

Low for a human, yes. But for a computer simulation, it's a record high.