Death, Solitaire, and Socrates
A meditation on lonely card games and stoic philosophy
Did you know that some 80% of solitaire games are winnable? I certainly didn’t. But evidently that is factual. Go ahead. Look it up. I’ll be here. Possibly playing solitaire. But the issue is that if you play solitaire as its rules demand, and if you are human, you are not necessarily going to make only logical choices, and even if you do make consistently logical choices, there is sufficient chance in solitaire that a winnable game may be lost.
Some of this gets into the genius of the now standard card deck — or really any card deck if we’re honest — in that, mathematically speaking, there are just tons of possibilities. So yeah, we can statistically calculate that 80% of solitaire games are winnable, simply because the cards needed to win are ordered such that theoretically you will be able to access them with the right sequence of moves. But you don’t know their order, nor does the “right sequence of moves” necessarily adhere to any given strategy.
I’ve been playing a lot of solitaire recently, and reading a lot of stoic philosophy, which — in case you were curious — is definitely not the key to happiness. You may ask why, and I really can’t give you a meaningful answer. I have access to less depressing games, and I can read whatever I damn well…
