Who invented solitaire

Of course, Solitaire has been around for a lot longer than 25 years. Before it was a game you played on your computer, Solitaire was, and is, a game you play with cards. You're probably already familiar with the basic premise: You set up cards face down in a certain shape and flip them to build foundations in sequential order.

For example, in Klondike , the objective is to uncover four aces and build sequential foundations from those cards. The exact origin of Solitaire isn't all that clear. The earliest printed reference of the world solitaire the game appeared in , according to the Oxford English Dictionary OED. However, this probably refers to peg solitaire , a board game played with marbles and pegs. Solitaire the card game more likely came about toward the end of the 18th century , perhaps "in the Baltic region of Europe and possibly as a form of fortune-telling.

Moreover, in Scandinavian countries, the game is apparently known as cabale , which is related to cabal , a "mystical interpretation of the Old Testament. The game of Patience originated in the U.

The OED has the earliest mention in It's borrowed French: "I should be obliged to fetch the cards for you to play 'Grande Patience'" — giving some credence to the theory that the game originated in France.

The first mention in English is from in a letter from a Countess Granville "We were occupied all yesterday evening with conjuring tricks and patiences of every kind".

While there might have been some difference between Solitaire and Patience at first, they now seem interchangeable. Even back in , the first book about the pastime refers to "games of solitaire or patience," with no distinction between the two.

As for their simultaneous rise in popularity in different parts of the world, urbanization might have had something to do with it. The Industrial Revolution , which began in Britain in the late 18th century, transformed rural societies in Europe and the U.

The farm became less central and families less tight knit. Accordingly, this could be the precursor or origin of the card game. Peg Solitaire is played on a board, which in its most usual version has the shape of a cross and 33 holes, with the central hole empty and the remaining holes occupied by pins or pegs.

The aim is to leave only one peg occupying the centre position. To do this, the player must eliminate pegs one by one by jumping them over one another —horizontally or vertically— to occupy a free space. Like this:. Two simpler initial configurations are presented below.

The challenge is to achieve the goal of having only one peg left in the centre hole:. The card game that is ultimately identified as solitaire likely emerged in the late 18th century in the Baltic countries as a form of fortune telling.

This hypothesis is supported by the boom that card reading underwent at that time and by the fact that in Scandinavia the game was called Cabale , a term that has been linked to the Jewish Kabbalah.

From there it would have quickly spread to the rest of Europe, as witnessed by the fact that the first reference to the term in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from It is also reported that the first known work on solitaire a collection of games was published in Russia in , followed shortly thereafter by others in Germany and France. The game became so popular that already in his Great Expectations , Charles Dickens introduces one of the characters playing solitaire, known as Patience in the U.

Almost from the moment it became popular, solitaire attracted the attention of mathematicians, who, supported by the recent branch of Game Theory, tried to determine, among other things, the probability of winning a game. This calculation has resisted them ever since and has come to be regarded as one of the most challenging problems in mathematics. Danish Solitaire is a mathematical game in which cards with values from 1 to 10 must be placed in this arrangement:.

The idea is that the sum of the four cards that make up each rhombus and the sum of the four cards in the centre row equals 20, 21, 22, 23, and How do you place them so that they add up to 20, and 22?

At the end of the 20th century, solitaire experienced a new and unexpected boost in popularity with the appearance of personal computers.

Thanks in large part to Microsoft , which decided to incorporate the game —specifically, the version known as Klondike— into the Windows 3. Since then, not only has it been maintained in all subsequent versions of Windows, but Microsoft has also introduced new versions of the game in what is surely a safe bet, since, according to the tech giant, Solitaire is the most used of all its programs , even ahead of Word and Excel.

And it has been precisely through the use of computers and specifically an Artificial Intelligence program called Solvitaire that the probability of winning has finally been established for 45 different version of the game, among them, Klondike, for which the success rate is It was reported that Napolean Bonaparte was known to have spent time playing the solitaire during his exile at St. Helena in , and the game of solitaire or patience as it is known in Europe, then became a popular pastime and hobby with the population of France not long after.

Many of the terms that are still sometimes today used in the game e. Also many of the early books on the subject are also of French origin. In the present, solitaire holds a stronghold as a beloved pastime for many people.