Peg solitaire

Before I forget, I might as well mention that I wandered into www.shockwave.com sometime last week for the first time after so many months (a year perhaps?). I ended up playing peg solitaire.

I first played peg solitaire when it was given by my cousin to my sister and I as a gift. I was just eleven years old then and when I did try solving it ended up with one peg--although not in the middle hole as required. At that time, I just dismissed it as a fluke, that I had made a mistake somewhere along the way by failing to remove a peg that I had jumped. I don't believe I made any other attempt to solve it after that and the puzzle was forgotten.

Then more than ten years I acquired a version of it written for Windows 95 and completely surprised myself when, after just a few attempts, I solved the first and simplest configuration: the cross. I was immediately challenged and tried out the rest of the configurations: plus, arrow, pyramid, diamond, fireplace and the original. Somehow I must have picked up on a technique because I ended up solving every one of them that same evening!

Now this peg solitaire on the Shockwave games website had at lot more configurations; the square board version had fifty! I managed to solve all up to #37 before I had to quit due to the late hour. (I had an 8am lecture class the next day.) One frustration I had though was once I managed to solve a configuration, I almost never could remember exactly how I did it. Then later when I found that I had accumulated 44,790 points, I tried to post it among the high scores on the website but couldn't. I wasn't registered or, if I actually did long time ago, had forgotten my username and password. And then I found that the highest score posted was around 23,000 points. Damn!

P.S.
I've just realized that I should have taken a screenshot of my score... another damn!