Thursday, June 17, 2010

Day 153: The World of Solitaire

Dear Family-

Today I spent a considerable amount of time online researching the game of Solitaire.  As you know, Solitaire seems to be the game of choice for people with ADD these days.  Well, there were a lot of websites that tried to tackle the problem by demonstrating the how the win/loss ratio could be shown through equations.  What I found was a lot of confusing math surrounding the problem.  It comes down to the fact that there are three classifications of games: Playable Winnable, Playable Not-Winnable, and Not Playable.  Looking at the raw math was kind of boring, but I found a site where a guy with too much time on his hands wrote a program to run the game of Solitaire over and over again.  He found that after playing 10,000 games the following would hold true: 
Out of 10,000 games, 861 could be played all the way through.
Out of 10,000 games, 554 had no moves at the start of the game. (Before playing the deck)
Out of 10,000 games, 23 games had no moves even playing the deck.
Out of 10,000 games, 45 had all black or all red at the start of the game.

So, what does this all mean?  It means that a winning percentage of 14% is not bad at all, but according to the math, your percentage will continue to go down the more games you play.  Sorry for the bad news, but you can still have fun!

Love you all!

1 comment:

Erin said...

ROFLMBO! That is so funny. Thanks for finding that for me. I guess I can feel better for being such a Solitaire loser. (I wonder how many games I've actually played?)