21–30 of 30 posts
shameless plug: a minesweeper solver I wrote [http://mrgris.com/projects/minesweepr/demo/player/]
Another priority with the first click is that you won't be entirely surrounded by mines and wires, wires being indeterminate, entangled chains of unrevealed spaces. I'm pretty sure a probability can be worked out for rate of occurrence and length of a wire - but with the corner strategy, you're minimizing the likely amount of perimeter by 3/4. That's got to make a "coin flip" situation more likely, which has to be we…
Paper on minesweeper configurations being NP-complete. Wires in the paper are wires when approached from all directions, but I'm abusing the term a bit when I also include entangled squares around the perimeter of a minesweeper opening - which have only been approached from one direction.
I think of minesweeper as a bunch of soap bubbles that are popped until you reach wires, which if they connect board boundary to board boundary, or connect to another wire that does that, or connect to themselves, end the skill game and create a probability game. Been meaning to play around with 2D areas that are surrounded by wire rings, but too lazy.
The idea of randomness carved by rules creating stable shapes intrigues me. I play minesweeper too much. Expert: 78, 95 non-flagging, lawl.
Would it be possible to make a 3D Minesweeper game inside Minecraft?
you can build a monitor and computer in minecraft, you could specialize them to play minesweeper. I think you'd run into 300 block range problems (the world isn't simulated far away, you simply don't have enough room to wire up the redstone)
Alternatively, mods can screw around with block ids. you could provide number textures for blocks and a few special blocks. All that's left is to swap block types as the user interacts with the blocks.
Speaking as someone who has spent WAY too much time playing minesweeper -- Early on I came to a similar conclusion (though without doing the actual math) and started clicking on corners initially. I soon discovered, as most people do, that corners are much more likely to expand out into a tiny opening that you can only follow for a short time before you're forced to make a "coin toss" move. If the goal is to make a _…
Speaking as the same sort of person (96 secs on expert :-) ), I agree that the most useful strategy is to click in the middle. This is because the cost of restarting is practically nothing for your first few clicks (no sunk time costs), so what you should really be optimizing is trying to get the most information about the board as soon as possible. All the more so because optimally your whole game will proceed logic…
When I'm going for a high score, I want the fastest time (and lost games don't count for anything). So I guess a lot, especially in the first few seconds, looking for good spreads and free information.
When I'm in the mood for a logic puzzle, I go for the best completion rate (percentage of games won). Then I click a single corner and work with whatever I get, guessing again only if my remaining options are guesses anyway. (The corner eliminates at least one bad endgame).
When I just want a fun experience, I go for most games completed in a session. In that case, I click all four corners to start to eliminate bad endgames. Those aren't a fun experience.
Would it be possible to make a 3D Minesweeper game inside Minecraft?
With a couple new blocks, though -- a new game control, the mine blocks themselves -- it would be a moderately easy mod. Putting dynamic textures on the blocks to display numbers wouldn't be (in principle) any harder than some of the grass mods, and there's an onDestroy hook for the block you could use to clear space.
I wonder how hard 3D minecraft would be.
[Edit: Ha! It's been done! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV6n0UWJM2Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW71giahaLM
This is why we google things before building them.]
[Edit edit: Oh, nuts. Those are both still 2D. This is why we review google results before deciding not to build something.]
Would it be possible to make a 3D Minesweeper game inside Minecraft?
Inside Minecraft proper, it would be prohibitively difficult. Redstone doesn't really support programming that complex (keeping 3D state, cleared areas, randomizing the board, etc.). With a couple new blocks, though -- a new game control, the mine blocks themselves -- it would be a moderately easy mod. Putting dynamic textures on the blocks to display numbers wouldn't be (in principle) any harder than some of the gra…
Er, wow. Hard.
This seems totally wrong to me. Of course the probability of surrounding squares being all safe is higher in the corner simply because there are fewer surrounding squares ! To make it more fair, calculate the probability that 3+ adjacent squares would be safe, since that's how many you get in the corner. Then the math shows that center is better because there are more neighboring squares that could be potentially bla…
..and from my experience, three clicks is about optimum for speed and opening the board. All my sub 80s games have opened 'gashes' across the board, the three clicks gives you the best chance of jumping the 'wire' (as the other guy put it)..
If you are going to have to play the odds at some point anyway, may as well do it at the start before you invest 50s of your life in some pointless activity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I can recall, hitting a bomb on the first click is possible. But, if the source code proves my memory wrong, it certainly wouldn't be the first time.
I wonder if this is an enhancement in Vista Minesweeper? I'm almost certain that it used to be possible to land on a mine with your first click in older versions.