Way To Much Solitaire


  • ♿ (Parody)

    From Veselin Georgiev a.k.a. anrieff ...
     
    Back in the year of 2002, me and a friend of mine went to the place of some friends. They had recently purchased a PC and we installed some entertainment software, amongst which, "Hoyle board games" or something like that. It contained many games, including Solitaire. It was just like the Windows', but had an enhanced GUI and statistics, etc.

    So it has been a while since I haven't had visited those friends, but when I went there in 2005 and toyed around with the computer, I was pretty amazed by the number of "Solitaire games played" that were in the statistics: no less than 1700! The following conversation was the next to occur:

    Me: Gee! This is a huge number of games you've played...
    She: Well. They have been much more, but the counter was reset.
    Me: What do you mean?
    She: Well, suddenly it became negative, but kept increased towards zero with each game played and so now it is positive again.

    No comment! The last time I saw a 16-bit counter overflow was in Dune II...



  • So am I getting this right, they played no less than 67236 games of solitaire in the space of 3 years,thats an average of 61 games per day, a little excessive me thinks, is it even possible?



  • Well, I think we are doing the wrong calculations:


    What's the average time of a Solitaire Game she played?

    She could be playing 30-seconds, or maybe 2 hours...



  • Maybe it was a 32 bit counter (as one would expect) and they played that game really often.



  • Maybe the game had a very quick way to restart a game (like a hotkey), and they would just restart the game over and over until a good starting position occured. So effectively, they've just played 1/20th of the games or so.



  • @Hitsuji said:

    So am I getting this right, they played no less than 67236 games of solitaire in the space of 3 years,thats an average of 61 games per day, a little excessive me thinks, is it even possible?

    Sure.  I can beat klondike style solitare in about 70 seconds for a winning game.  It takes less to lose.

    Depending on the style of play, flip 3/flip 1, with or without a strict number of deck flips; or in vegas style, it's either dramatically shorter or dramatically faster.

    Generally my rounds for vegas style klondike only take about half a minute, if the round is a cash winning.  Flip 1/strict is the next quickest by game termination rate, and any of the flip 3's follow up.  Seriously, once it becomes a habitual thing, and you're not really thinking about it, 61 games a day, actually played, isn't that many.  Got a lunch hour?


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