Sim­ply put: What is Soli­taire, and what are the best ones?

Every com­puter user knows at least one Soli­taire game. You might pre­fer Klondike, or Can­field, or maybe one of the hun­dreds of lesser-​​known ver­sions. Spend some time look­ing around, and famil­iar­ize your­self with the basic design pat­tern that rep­re­sents “a soli­taire game”.

What does it include?

• One or more decks of cards, per­haps with cer­tain cards (Jok­ers, or low-​​value cards) removed.
• Two or more “stacks” in a tableau — generic posi­tions where cards can be placed.
• Some rule for how to ini­tial­ize the game: shuf­fling and ini­tial place­ment. These involve what cards are face up, face down, whether they are known or hidden.
• A “round loop” that describes a set of one or more shifts of one or more sub­stacks of cards between loca­tions, pos­si­bly includ­ing mov­ing some cards from the hid­den undealt stack to a stack where they can be “used”. Allowed moves within a round may be gov­erned by a com­pli­cated set of con­straints involv­ing posi­tion, suit, value, prece­dence and how many cards may be moved.
• A win con­di­tion, typ­i­cally involv­ing a par­tic­u­lar state of cards being in par­tic­u­lar order in par­tic­u­lar stacks. For the pur­poses of this exer­cise (and pos­si­bly with­out loss of gen­er­al­ity) the win con­di­tion may be taken as a sin­gle spe­cific order­ing of the entire set of cards in play, over the set of stacks.

[Did I miss much?]

So.

Limn the set of soli­taire games. Present a for­mal, nonbrit­tle lan­guage in which any soli­taire game may be writ­ten. By being nonbrit­tle, your lan­guage will allow ran­dom sam­ples of the set of all fea­si­ble soli­taire games to be made by sim­ple aggre­ga­tion (fill­ing in words with­out the need for back­track­ing at any point), and will also allow one game to be trans­formed into another by local changes (sub­sti­tu­tion, dele­tion, swap­ping and inser­tion of words).

Bad soli­taire, good soli­taire. Present a suite of rea­son­able quan­ti­ta­tive mea­sures that will cap­ture the com­plex­ity, dif­fi­culty, and enter­tain­ment value of any given soli­taire game.

hint: Think about sudoku games. What makes a dif­fi­cult game? What makes an enter­tain­ing game?

Dri­ving through south­ern Michi­gan and north­west­ern Ohio yes­ter­day, hav­ing run through the last disc of Vic­to­rian Britain, I had to resort to the radio. Scan scan scan.

Near Detroit, this resulted in sev­eral Urban Con­tem­po­rary (or what­ever the genre is called these days) hits, quite a bit of talk­ing about pol­i­tics, some of the “only alter­na­tive” genre [when did “The Only New Music” come to imply “…That You Heard in 1995″?], a cou­ple of Clas­si­cal sta­tions, one or two large-​​format Chris­t­ian ones, a cou­ple of “Col­lege” sta­tions that are in fact national NPR affil­i­ates, and one Old and one New Coun­try sta­tion. Maybe a Latin one in there somewhere.

In Find­lay, which is down south of Toledo, we have a very dif­fer­ent mix: Clas­sic Rock has appeared and come to dom­i­nate; the one or two Col­lege sta­tions sound like col­lege kids are run­ning them; no Clas­si­cal; no Latin; five or six Coun­try sta­tions of var­i­ous denom­i­na­tions; Chris­tian­ity as stat­icky rumbly wit­ness­ing, preach­ing and rant­ing, not as pol­ished national networks.

Sup­pose you sam­pled the com­plete radio offer­ings along cross-​​country tran­sect. Say the entire length of US 6. What you would do is record every chan­nel a stan­dard car radio could receive, full-​​time, con­tin­u­ously in time and space.

How would you mea­sure the diver­sity of the results? How might that mea­sure be dis­trib­uted? What would you expect? What might sur­prise you? What pat­terns, in other words, would arise?

And to get back to my thoughts from around Find­lay, Ohio yes­ter­day: where along the path might you expect to hear mod­ern American-​​style Coun­try [what do they actu­ally call the new music video stuff?] sung in a for­eign language?

I found myself want­ing to hear it in Ara­bic. Or Farsi. Or French, even. I find the music catchy and the lyrics cun­ning — con­tain­ing some of the best of mod­ern light verse — and not at all hack­neyed if you try pay atten­tion. The best can­di­date for export (since rap), in other words.

I await the mul­ti­lin­gual result with inter­est. And I am curi­ous to know where along my tran­sect it will first appear.