Records
The historical record progression for the four standard variants, compiled by the community at morpionsolitaire.com (maintained by Christian Boyer — the authoritative source; verify there). A repeated creator is carried down from the row above. 4T and 4D are solved: 62 and 35 are optimal, proven by Quist’s 2008 complete enumeration. 5T and 5D remain open.
5T — five in a line, touching
| Moves | Creator | Country | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 149 | Charles William Millington | UK | September 1972 |
| 152 | Charles William Millington | UK | June 1974 |
| 162 | Rémy Daubié | France | November 1974 |
| 163 | Charles William Millington | UK | July 1975 |
| 164 | Michel Szeps · Joseph Martin · Yoland Strehl | France | November 1975 |
| 170 | Charles-Henri Bruneau | France | April 1976 |
| 172 | Christopher D. Rosin | USA | August 2010 |
| 177 | Christopher D. Rosin | USA | May 2011 |
| 178 | Christopher D. Rosin | USA | August 2011 |
Bruneau’s 170, found by hand, held the record for 34 years (1976–2010).
5D — five in a line, disjoint
| Moves | Creator | Country | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 64 | Arthur Langerman | Belgium | ≤ January 1996 |
| 65 | Stefan Schmieta | USA | October 1996 |
| 66 | Stefan Schmieta | USA | October 1996 |
| 68 | Arthur Langerman | Belgium | October 1999 |
| 69 | Bernard Helmstetter | France | September 2005 |
| 74 | Heikki Hyyrö & Timo Poranen | Finland | December 2006 |
| 76 | Tristan Cazenave | France | December 2006 |
| 78 | Tristan Cazenave | France | May 2007 |
| 79 | Heikki Hyyrö & Timo Poranen | Finland | June 2007 |
| 80 | Tristan Cazenave | France | February 2008 |
| 82 | Christopher D. Rosin | USA | August 2010 |
4T — four in a line, touching (solved)
| Moves | Creator | Country | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 56 | Demaine, Demaine, Langerman, Langerman | USA – Belgium | May 2004 |
| 62 | Heikki Hyyrö & Timo Poranen | Finland | October 2007 (optimal) |
4D — four in a line, disjoint (solved)
| Moves | Creator | Country | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 31 | Demaine, Demaine, Langerman, Langerman | USA – Belgium | May 2004 |
| 35 | Heikki Hyyrö & Timo Poranen | Finland | October 2007 (optimal) |
Playable grids in this project
These records are shipped, with provenance, in the
morpion-solitaire-records
corpus crate. Each record’s source links to its original Pentasol file or grid
image on morpionsolitaire.com; the 4T and 4D records — which the site publishes
only as images — were transcribed and re-verified as legal games.
The source of truth for each record is its JSON file in the repository
(linked from the image below). Every other format is generated from it: a
rendered board (PNG/SVG with the full record embedded, so the picture is also
a save), the compact .msr, and — for 5T/5D — the legacy Pentasol form.
Every format, for every record, is one click away. Each record <id> (the
file stem, e.g. rosin178) is published at a stable URL:
https://morpion-solitaire.io/records/<id>.{json, msr, png, svg, psol}
To load any of them, just drag and drop the downloaded file onto the
web app (or onto the desktop GUI) — .png,
.svg, .msr, .json and .psol are all accepted, and an image that embeds a
record loads just like a save. The board numbers each move in play order.
4D — solved (optimal 35)
4T — solved (optimal 62)
5D
5T
There are no downloadable game files for the non-standard variants (5T+, 5T#, infinite, …).
Help wanted: more historical grids
This corpus is far from complete. Many older record grids — the pre-2004 4T/4D progressions, Bartsch’s 5D-102, and assorted hand-drawn grids — aren’t here yet, often because they survive only as photographs of graph-paper grids that resist automatic transcription.
Contributions are very welcome. If you have a record grid — an image, a Pentasol file, or just a move list — please share it (even a photo helps) by opening an issue or pull request on GitHub.
The image-transcription helper (tools/grid_to_msr.py) and the
contributing guide
describe how a grid becomes a verified .json record.