Good Morning Lowcountry

Solitaire

Back in the dark ages when personal computers were new, there were ancient games called Pac Man and Pong.

Then along came FreeCell and then other computer versions of solitaire, the game that had been played for about 200 years with real cards.

Mark R. Sullivan/Home News Tribune

Solitaire's a rock topic, too. Mike Ness (left), of punk band Social Distortion, plays with Bruce Springsteen at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park, N.J. Springsteen sang backup on Ness's album "Cheating at Solitaire."

According to John Levin, who wrote an article on solitaire for Slate's special section on Procrastination ("A Brief History of Wasting Time"), it's the most popular computer game in the world. According to Slate, it's the No. 1 way to procrastinate.

"Computer solitaire propelled the revolution of personal computing, augured Microsoft's monopolistic tendencies, and forever changed office culture," Levin wrote.

How did it change office culture? Well, it gave cubicle workers a way to pretend to be busy at the computer. But then, it also kept them chained to their desks for more hours.

Solitaire is a mental exercise, admittedly a tiny, simple one. Most players think of it as meditation. It seems to put people instantly into alpha brain waves, as most repetitive actions do ... yoga, meditation, mantras, liturgy, prayer, whirling dervishes, etc.

GMLc plays computer solitaire (at home, boss, at home). We like solitaire because we learned it as a child ... about the same time we learned how to do card tricks, how to mark cards and how to cheat at poker.

In fact, we're sort of obsessed with computer solitaire for a strange reason. We're trying to figure out if the algorithm that drives solitaire allows for all permutations of hands available from 52 cards.

We want to know how random the dealing actually is. We want to know why so many doubles keep coming up and why there never seem to be any 10s handy ... why hands are either all red or all black ... why the ace, two and three of diamonds show up in the same spots all the time ... why sevens, fours and sixes are so popular in the deal.

It's hard to cheat at computer solitaire. But we think the program is cheating us by giving us predictable hands.

The truth is that the hands in computer solitaire are not random. But neither are they predetermined. It's very hard to get a computer to generate true random numbers ... or cards.

Still solitaire fascinates ... or compels, rather.

"You don't win that often, but you have these incremental victories," Levin told National Public Radio. "When you do get the jackpot, or cards bouncing on the screen, it's super-exciting."

GMLc wouldn't go that far.

Students of law

Look for a bumper crop of lawyers from Berkeley County in coming years.

Berkeley High School has been named the South Carolina Bar's Law Related Education High School of the Year. The honor came with a $5,000 grant from the Bar, presented Monday.

Berkeley has won eight state championships in the High School Mock Trial Program and has won regionally for more than 15 years.

Actually, the S.C. Bar's law- related education program isn't designed to grow lawyers, although the program does carry scholarships. Its purpose is to help students better understand their roles as democratic citizens.

We've never been to a mock trial, although we once sat on a jury for a petty thief (the prosecution charged that he was a grand thief).

Some of the other jurors were really ... generous.

"He served his country. We should let him go," said one.

"It's his birthday," said another. (It was, in fact, the defendant's birthday.)

"We should let him go."

GMLc
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