Thursday 21 February 2008

FreeCell

Where the work-avoidant who have exhausted the tedium of Solitaire go to die.



"When Microsoft FreeCell became very popular during the 1990s it was not clear which of the 32,000 deals in the program were solvable. To clarify the situation, Dave Ring started The Internet FreeCell Project, took on the problem to try to solve all the deals using human solvers. Ring assigned 100 consecutive games chunks across volunteering human solvers and collected the games that they reported to be unsolvable, and assigned them to other people. This project used the power of multiprocessing, where the processors were human brains, to quickly converge on the answer. The project was finished in October 1995, and only one game defied every human player's attempt: #11,982, which has been shown to be unsolvable by several exhaustive-search software solvers."

1 comment:

ISOPROPYL RICECAKE said...

yeah that meshed computational method is called Crowdsourcing. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a good example of it: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=15879911

it's telling that the mother fuckers pay out not only in Dollars, but in Rupees. Lawed Labor Be Damned!