Black Hole Solitaire Solver

This is a solver, written in C, to solve the Solitaire variant called “Black Hole”. It provides a portable C library, and a command line application that after being fed with a layout will emit the cards to move to the “black hole” (the foundation).

Download

• black_hole_solver-0.2.0.tar.xz - requires CMake to be built.
• The Games-Solitaire-BlackHole-Solver CPAN Distribution - an older version of the solver written as a proof-of-concept, which produces identical results, but is much slower and consumes more memory.
• black_hole_solver.dump.xz - results from running the solver on the first 1 million PySolFC deals - inside the dump of an SQLite database.

Solving Data

We’ve ran the solver on the first 1 million PySolFC Black Hole Solitaire deals and one can download the data from that as a compressed textual dump of an SQLite database.

Here’s a description of the tables of the database:

1. bhs_runs - this table contains the results and statistics of running the solver on the boards. Its columns are:

   1. idx - the index of the PySolFC deal.
   2. status - a character representing the verdict - ‘U’ for unsolved, ‘S’ for solved.
   3. num_checked - the number of iterations that were checked (“num_times”). If the game was unsolved, then it will be equal to num_generated (see below).
   4. num_generated - the number of states generated (and not necessarily checked). May only be different if the deal was solved.

2. bhs_solutions - this table contains the compacted solutions for the solved boards. Its columns are:

   1. idx - the index of the deal (that must be ‘S’ on “bhs_runs”).
   2. solution - this is the compacted solution. The 0,2,4 etc. characters are the indices of the stacks moved in the range 1-17. The 1,3,5 etc. characters are the corresponding moved cards after calculating chr(1 + $suits_to_n{$s} * 13 + $ranks_to_n{$r}) where the suits are ordered H,C,D,S. It will total 51*2 characters. Here’s the script that was used to generate them from the more verbose solution files.

Project Links

• Bitbucket.org repository
• search.cpan.org Record
• kobesearch Record
• Freecode Record

Similar Projects

• Freecell Solver and other Solitaire solvers.

Licence

The solver is original work and is subject to the terms of the MIT/X11 licence, which is a Public Domain-like open-source licence.

News

Version 0.2.0

Version 0.2.0 of Black Hole Solitaire Solver was released. The highlight of this release is the porting of the solver from Perl to C which yields a very dramatic gain in speed and memory consumption. As a result of this effort, we have run the solver on the first 1 million PySolFC deals of Black Hole Solitaire and have drawn some conclusions:

• Solving Statistics for the First 1 Million PySolFC Black Hole Solitaire Deals
• Follow-up with number of unsolved deals with positions span below a certain threshold

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