How Windows FreeCell Gave Rise To Online Crowdsourcing 93
TPIRman writes "In 1994, a physics doctoral student named Dave Ring assembled more than 100 math and puzzle enthusiasts on Usenet for what became one of the earliest online 'crowdsourcing' projects. Their goal: to determine if every hand in Windows' FreeCell solitaire game was in fact winnable, as the program's help file implied. Their efforts soon focused in on one incredibly stubborn hand: #11,982. They couldn't beat it, but in the process of trying, they proved the viability of an idea that would later be refined with crowdsourcing models like Amazon's Mechanical Turk."
Missing from article (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't look like he ever proved that the hand in question was not solvable. It only claims that by having many human players try to solve it and several different AI approaches, that it was never solved.
The article ends by implying that this was a victory, because the outcome of all 32,000 hands is now known. But, as far as I can tell, one hand is still undecided!
Re:early distributed computing (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the first large distributed project is the Cunnigham project:
http://books.google.com/books?id=udr3tHHwBl0C&lpg=PA375&ots=s4GNA3LkQo&pg=PA375 [google.com]
that started in 1949 on the ENIAC !
And this project is still ongoing.
In fact, this search started with human efforts, so it was already heavily crowd-sourced since a least 3 centuries.
The culmination of the manual effort came in 1903, when Frank Nelson Cole showed that:
193,707,721 × 761,838,257,287 = 2^67 - 1
It took 3 years of Sundays to discover.
http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article030105.html [rutherfordjournal.org]
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Interesting)
I played about 5,000 hands of Spider Solitaire at 4 suits.. My win percentage is about 8% but I can go for many games at a time without a win and then get 2 wins in a row..and once 4 wins in a row.