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Making Explainable Minesweeper

sublevelgames.github.io

21–30 of 44 posts

Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper

#21

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...

Yes, that's right. I'll have to update my blog with additional information about this. Thank you!

Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper

#22

Simon 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…

I tried some no-guess variants but somehow there's a kind of sterile feeling to it. For some reason it makes it more boring compared to vanilla variant. It of course excels when I'm getting frustrated at guesses and 50/50, but otherwise I play the normal minesweeper more.

Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper

#23

Simon 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 made something like this a while back: https://github.com/g-rocket/minesweeper

Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper

#24
Many 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 I'm thinking of?

Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper

#25
post #24

Many 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

#26

Simon 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…

Unfortunately it doesn't have proper controls and cell sizes (doesn't expand to the screen, so remain small), so it's easy to mistap on a wrong cell or mistap instead of mishold. Basically, controls aren't optimized for a touch screen

Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper

#27

Simon 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…

I wouldn't describe it as a hack necessarily. This is called rejection sampling, and it's just fine as long as the rejection rate is low enough.

Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper

#28
post #24

Many 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.

what I'm thinking of is, I believe, much older. I remember playing it before 2010 at least based on the machine I was playing it on. And it was distinctly "windows" styled: it looked like windows minesweeper!

Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper

#29
Recently I have discovered Tametsi ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/709920 ), which is something like Minesweeper on steroids and some advanced levels can't be solved without advanced reasoning. If Minesweeper feels too easy/boring, this might be the right challenge for you.

Re: Making Explainable Minesweeper

#30
If you’re interested in this you might like the game Bombe (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262930/Bombe/) - a game about defining rules to let the computer solve various minesweeper (and more advanced variants) puzzles.

It’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!

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