Minesweeper: Advanced Tactics (2005)

[ronilan]

When someone says "minesweeper" I always shamelessly plug my js implementation: http://www.ronilan.com/bugsweeper/ Don't ask me why.

[tempestn]

Because you know that after reading about minesweeper, a person naturally wants to play minesweeper. Thanks!

One thing I noticed though - in oldschool minesweeper, left click would test, and right would flag. Right seems to always flag here, but left sometimes tests, and sometimes toggles. Regardless, bookmarked.

[kyberias]

It should have the same mouse usage. Now it's totally random: sometimes left mouse "opens" up a square, sometimes it puts a flag on it.

[Buge]

It has a bug. When I right click to add a flag, then right click to remove the flag, then left click to reveal it adds a flag instead of revealing.

[logicallee]

you don't have the same behavior - when you click with both mouse buttons and it doesn't have the exact number of neighbors, it should depress the neighbor squares until you let go. like this -

http://i.imgur.com/843NK6H.png

[newton3]

I just had to play to see what your animation is when you win!

[LVB]

Thanks. Nice game.

[luckyt]

I implemented a lot of these tactics, and my AI achieved about 50% success rate on expert mode.

https://luckytoilet.wordpress.com/2012/12/23/2125/

[thomasahle]

Cool! It's nice to know that 50% solvability is possible.

One note: In your example with the 11 configurations, are you sure that just clicking the squares with lowest counts, is the optimal way to go? It might be that while they are cheap, they also give little useful information on which configuration we are actually in? Perhaps some dynamic programming type solution could give the "clicking order" ensuring maximal winning probability.

[kiliankoe]

Thanks for your post! I remember reading this sometime in 2013 and writing my own minesweeper AI based on it. It didn't get very far, but I sure had a lot of fun.

[heinrich5991]

https://sourceforge.net/projects/mines-perfect/

It's awesome, it has Murphy's Law (if there is a possibility that the field you just clicked has a mine, then it will have one), always solvable levels and some variations of the board (think hexagonal, 3d). And it runs nicely in Wine.

Try it. :)

[okamiueru]

This analysis does not mention a implementation quirk for resolving hitting a mine on the first click. Shortly described: If the first cell clicked has a mine, move the mine to the first free cell starting from top left, and search row by row from left to right, top to bottom.

It did not trigger for the game in question, as there is no mine in the top left corner. However, in normal games, with all other things considered equal, top left corner would have a higher chance of having a mine than anywhere else.

[jbrantly]

I used to play minesweeper so much I would dream about it. I recently went looking for a replacement and found Hexcells Infinite which has really filled the gap. All puzzles are solvable and it even has nice music. Highly recommended.

[sandworm101]

Honestly, minesweeper is the one thing i really miss having on my home machines since dropping windows. There are some versions out there that are very similar but none have the feel and speed of the classic on xp or 3.1.

[speps]

Copy the .exe from a friend and use Wine

[chris_st]

There's a pretty good iOS (and maybe Android?) game called PsyCard [1] that's a card-based variant of Minesweeper. It's from Ludosity, so the art is insane and the difficulty is substantial.

I'll be interested to see if these techniques help.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/psycard/id1078267846?mt=8

[Brainix]

Amazing article. I had underdeveloped but original (to me) ideas along these lines, as I'm sure that many Hacker News readers did.

Apologies in advance for bikeshedding, but "Final Solution" is a jarring phrase, and that section heading diverted my attention.

https://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007...

[dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp]

One thing that got my minesweeper game times down was to never actually mark the mines as such, just click the unturned squares you know aren't mines.

[3131s]

From what I've observed top players flag mines very minimally, only so that they can strategically chord in certain situations. Lists of record scores typically make a distinction between flagging mines vs. not doing so. I never flag mines, but I'm also not that good compared to the best of the best.

For reference, the best of the best is Kamil Murański. There is only a 0.4 second difference between his NF (No Flag) time and his normal expert world record:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrZCWx0fnfc (flagging)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bsLwGf-vUE (no flagging)

[mikeash]

There are versions of Minesweeper which guarantee that you never have to guess. I find these to be a lot more fun. My understanding is that they work by using a solver on the generated field, and regenerating if the solver can't find a guaranteed solution. Search for "no guess minesweeper" on your favorite platform.

[Groxx]

Which I vastly prefer :| It's not very enjoyable to spend a good amount of time on a minesweeper-like game, and then have the end succeed/fail result dictated by a dice-roll.

[mvindahl]

Back in the day, I spent a fair amount of time playing Minecraft at the hard level. I did OK but my sister consistently beat me by large margins, completing in about 2/3 of the time that I used. It was a bit frustrating to be beaten that thoroughly.

Her advice, as I recall, was to never pause to think. When running out of no-brainers around one area, immediately skip to another area. When running out of easy options, take a chance. It worked well for her but I never managed to make it work for me. I'd always stop at some point to ponder for ten seconds.

[tydok]

I use a simple but effective tactic.

50-50 chances on nearby/adjacent tiles aren't actually 50%. If one tile would reveal a 4 and the other a 2, pick the second, because 4s are more rare.

[qiemem]

I don't follow. This would only work if the distribution of numbers was predetermined and influenced the distribution of mines. I was under the impression that the mines were uniformly distributed though. So in a "T" scenario, it really is 50-50. The fact that 4s are more rare doesn't matter at that point. Sort of like in a series of coin flips, of you've flipped 5 heads in a row, tails isn't more likely to come since 6 heads are rare: it's still just 50-60.

[myfancypants]

I'm a little late to this, but a while back I built a simple version of Minesweeper with an API to allow programmatic AI solvers for the game.

Would be great to hear any feedback on it!

https://github.com/myfancypants/minesweeper

[Retr0spectrum]

It would be interesting to built a minesweeper implementation that calculates mine positions dynamically. That way, you could resolve "unsolvable" situations like this by always favouring the player (or the opposite, if you're feeling evil).

[rtpg]

There is an OSS version of Minesweeper that does something like this! It would dynamically set the game grid so that you never need to guess.

Inversely, if you're guessing, it would make you lose ;)

It also included a hexagonal grid mode and other goodies, but I haven't touched it in 10 years and can't find it anymore. Might have been windows only, not sure

[speps]

Online https://archive.org/details/win3_Mineswee

[lonh]

I have a free version on iOS http://apple.co/1r5mC3g

[f_allwein]

A friend of mine called himself an MCSE - Minesweeper consultant and Solitaire expert.

[scotty79]

I wonder how good convolutional neural network could get at minesweeper.