javascript-tri-peaks-solitaire-solver

A brute force solver for Microsoft Tri-Peaks solitaire written in javascript.

This is a fork of Courtney Pitcher's project, which I've modified for my own purposes.

Unsolvable Boards

The most significant addition is that this solver will return one possible "best path" for unsolvable games — a set of moves that clears the most cards from the board.

This can help with games where the goal is not clearing the board, but clearing a certain set of cards or hitting a threshold of points.

NOTE: The "best path" returned is the first one found that clears the most cards. Hypothetically, a board could have multiple paths to clear the same number of cards. The path the solver returns might not clear the cards you need to clear. A possible future improvement could be returning, say, the top 5 best paths.

NOTE: Unsolvable boards can take a long time to process, so be patient. The sample unsolvable board below takes my computer almost 6 minutes to conclude.

Playing

I have yet to implement this in a website but it can be run directly in node. Eventually I'll put up a sample into which you can enter a string like one of these and get a solution:

• solvable: "8S TS 4D 7S 5D 7C 2D JH AC 3S 2H 3H 9H KC QC TD 8D 9C 7H 9D JS QS 4H 5C 5S 4C 2C QD 8C KD 3D KS JD 2S 7D KH AH 5H 9S 4S QH 6S 6D 3C JC TC 8H 6C TH AS AD 6H"
• partial board: "0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2D KH 8C 6S 6H 2C 8H JC 9C 4D AD TH 2S AS QH 5H AH 3H 2H 4S 6D 3C TS JD 9H KD AC JS 9S 4H 4C 5S 5D 5C"
• unsolvable: "2D 6D AD 9S 4C 7C 7S 7D 9C 2S AC 8D 6S 6H 3C 5H QS JS 4S JH 5C AS 3H 3S AH TD 4D 5S TH 7H KS QH 6C KD 8S 2C TC JC 5D 3D 2H TS 4H JD KC KH 8H QC 8C QD 9D 9H"

Notes

Per Courtney Pitcher, "This is probably quite a poor implementation." Please don't fault either of us, he was teaching himself javascript, and I'm probably even less qualified...

Tests

The test for an unsolvable board will cause the tests to take a long time to complete, almost 6 minutes on my computer.