The Microsoft 32,000 * Can they all be solved?
All of the 32,000 Microsoft deals except for number 11982 are solvable. Jim Horne’s version for Windows 3.1 contained 32,000 numbered deals (games), so that selecting a specific number would always produce the same deal. (These are random deals, generated by integer seeds using the random number generator in the Microsoft C compiler). He numbered the deals so that people could exchange the numbers of difficult/interesting deals with their friends, and also in the belief that some people would try to play sequentially through the deals; many people have in fact done so. Happily, when the game was ported to Windows 95 and later operating systems, the set of 32,000 deals was the same, so any discussion of deal numbers applies to all Microsoft versions. The help file for Microsoft FreeCell contains the claim “It is believed (though not proven) that every game is winnable.” When Horne wrote this, he already knew that unsolvable deals could be constructed (see Hans Bodlaender’s example): as
