Nice article, I wanted to point out though that your example board at the beginning has no such ambiguities or 50/50's. Here's a recreation of it so you can see for yourself, if you open it up from the bottom left as you did, the 1 2 1 leads to the board being solved rather quickly: https://agustinfitipaldi.com/minesweeper?seed=eyJ3aWR0aCI6OS...
Making Explainable Minesweeper
21–30 of 44 posts
Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper
#22Simon Tatham's Puzzles app has a minesweeper version that both A) generates on first click so you are guaranteed to never hit a mine on the first click and B) every board is 100% solvable with no need to guess. I have no idea what method it uses. I believe that _every_ puzzle in it is 100% solvable with no need to guess. It's also add free and completely local. It's a great app for anyone who likes puzzles on their p…
I looked at the code for this once. It's sort of a hack. It generates a random puzzle, tries to solve it with a deterministic backtracking(IIRC) solver that detects situations where it's stuck. If it is stuck, it shifts some mines around in the place where the solver got stuck, according to some heuristics, and keeps solving. It keeps doing this until the entire puzzle has been solved, verifying that the puzzle can b…
Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper
#23Simon Tatham's Puzzles app has a minesweeper version that both A) generates on first click so you are guaranteed to never hit a mine on the first click and B) every board is 100% solvable with no need to guess. I have no idea what method it uses. I believe that _every_ puzzle in it is 100% solvable with no need to guess. It's also add free and completely local. It's a great app for anyone who likes puzzles on their p…
Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper
#24Anyone know what minesweeper software I'm thinking of?
Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper
#25Many many years ago I remember playing a free minesweeper that had, among other things, hexagonal maps as an option, but the big thing was that it guaranteed that you would never need to guess. You could always figure out the answer, and I believe there was a mode where if you clicked in a way where you couldn't have deduced the answer it would put a mine in there to punish you. Anyone know what minesweeper software…
Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper
#26Simon Tatham's Puzzles app has a minesweeper version that both A) generates on first click so you are guaranteed to never hit a mine on the first click and B) every board is 100% solvable with no need to guess. I have no idea what method it uses. I believe that _every_ puzzle in it is 100% solvable with no need to guess. It's also add free and completely local. It's a great app for anyone who likes puzzles on their p…
Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper
#27Simon Tatham's Puzzles app has a minesweeper version that both A) generates on first click so you are guaranteed to never hit a mine on the first click and B) every board is 100% solvable with no need to guess. I have no idea what method it uses. I believe that _every_ puzzle in it is 100% solvable with no need to guess. It's also add free and completely local. It's a great app for anyone who likes puzzles on their p…
I looked at the code for this once. It's sort of a hack. It generates a random puzzle, tries to solve it with a deterministic backtracking(IIRC) solver that detects situations where it's stuck. If it is stuck, it shifts some mines around in the place where the solver got stuck, according to some heuristics, and keeps solving. It keeps doing this until the entire puzzle has been solved, verifying that the puzzle can b…
Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper
#28Many many years ago I remember playing a free minesweeper that had, among other things, hexagonal maps as an option, but the big thing was that it guaranteed that you would never need to guess. You could always figure out the answer, and I believe there was a mode where if you clicked in a way where you couldn't have deduced the answer it would put a mine in there to punish you. Anyone know what minesweeper software…
Apart from the mine theme (and punishing you by putting in extra mines), that sounds like Hexcells. Very reminiscent of minesweeper, and you never have to guess.
Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper
#29Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper
#30It’s a bit mind bending as you’re never actually solving the puzzles yourself, but creating sets of rules to solves whole classes of potential minesweeper patterns. It definitely solves that pleasurable puzzle solving itch!