I've spent perhaps 10 hours in the last week playing this game.
It tracks my percentage of wins/losses, though I never manage to keep it higher than 85%-90%.
The "Help" section of the program states that: "It is believed (although not proven) that every game is winnable."
I felt that I was getting really good at the game, and was starting to wonder just how good I could get. If I was careful enough, and only played the game when I wasn't tired, could I eliminate enough of my own errors to win every time? Is that even possible?
That bothered me, so I decided to find out. The day I decided to do so, I didn't have internet access, so I had to figure this out without research.
Hypothesis: All possible initial arrangements of the deck can lead to a win.
Ok. From that, I set out to prove how one could win every game, but that soon became a formulation of tactics, which I already know that I don't have enough of a mastery of to be able to win every time. It began to seem impossible to prove that every game could be won.
Then I remembered that there are very few situations in which I lose, and realized that it would be much simpler to imagine a game which could not be won, if that were possible.
Challenge: Find an initial arrangement of the deck in which no win is possible.
The picture at the top of this post is what I came up with.
- If the aces cannot be freed, the game cannot be won.
- Picking up any four cards will not free an ace.
- Every card is at least four cards away from its top or bottom mate (the number before or after it of opposite color).
- No more than three cards can be brought to a top mate before a no-win situation is reached.
- The only movements that allow three cards to move to their top mates, do not free any aces.
- The aces in this initial arrangement of cards cannot be freed, so this is an arrangement that cannot be solved.
- If this arrangement is included as a possible game in Free Cell, then there is at least one game of Free Cell that cannot be won, therefore: