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Minesweeper thermodynamics

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Re: Minesweeper thermodynamics

#31

Post by lifthrasiir »

gregfjohnson wrote: post #4

I hacked up a version of minesweeper that was “forgiving:” if there was no selection that was provably safe, it gave you a safe move. If you picked any square that was not provably a bomb, it would not be a bomb. Typically, as long as you don’t select a number of bombs equal to the number of squares , your first move is safe. I just extended that for the whole game. If you select N-1 bombs, you always win on the firs…

There is a Korean indie game made in RPG Maker MV that pushes this idea to the extreme, titled How can I be a brave in the isekai while I suck even at the minesweeper's novice level?! (rough translation, original: 지뢰찾기 초급을 겨우 깰까말까한 내가 이세계에서는 용사라고?). Too bad it's only available in Korean.

Re: Minesweeper thermodynamics

#32

Post by jabl »

cperciva wrote: post #13
donovanr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Units are up to you (with some constraints)! Physicists do this in practice a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units

Physicists also sometimes deal with inverse temperature aka "coldness".

This is to an extent a party trick to befuddle lay people. Physicists know perfectly well that temperature is not a well-defined concept out of equilibrium. And when in a population inversion experiment when "temperature" is determined to be negative (or "beyond infinite" if you will) it arises because for a short while you have a non-Boltzmannian distribution.

Re: Minesweeper thermodynamics

#33

Post by jabl »

Ma8ee wrote: post #23
wasabi991011 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true of any units. A lot of physicists say things like "set c=1", does that mean that meters/feet are bad units and we should instead be measuring our height in fractions of c? That sounds inconvenient to me.

I just calculated that I’m about 6.24 nanolightseconds. A nanolightsecond is just over a foot, so at least Americans should easily get use to the unit.

Ah, but most natural unit systems don't measure time in seconds either. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units

Re: Minesweeper thermodynamics

#34

Post by OscarCunningham »

jabl wrote: post #32
cperciva wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physicists also sometimes deal with inverse temperature aka "coldness".

This is to an extent a party trick to befuddle lay people. Physicists know perfectly well that temperature is not a well-defined concept out of equilibrium. And when in a population inversion experiment when "temperature" is determined to be negative (or "beyond infinite" if you will) it arises because for a short while you have a non-Boltzmannian distribution.

I don't think they were talking about negative temperature, they just mean that sometimes the convenient quantity to work with is β = 1/T.

Re: Minesweeper thermodynamics

#35

Post by yshklarov »

robinhouston wrote: post #26
gregfjohnson wrote: post #4

I hacked up a version of minesweeper that was “forgiving:” if there was no selection that was provably safe, it gave you a safe move. If you picked any square that was not provably a bomb, it would not be a bomb. Typically, as long as you don’t select a number of bombs equal to the number of squares , your first move is safe. I just extended that for the whole game. If you select N-1 bombs, you always win on the firs…

Simon Tatham's _Mines_ deals with this in a different way: it generates the mine positions in such a way that they can never lead to an ambiguous state during a game. https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/doc/min...

That's pretty neat. I wonder how it works. It's not obvious to me at all how to build something like this, as the program doesn't know the sequence in which the player will reveal the tiles.

I also once made my own variant of this (just like gregfjohnson's idea): A "lucky minesweeper" where luck can be toggled on/off at any point during the game: https://github.com/yshklarov/minesweeper

Re: Minesweeper thermodynamics

#36

Post by OscarCunningham »

yshklarov wrote: post #35
robinhouston wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simon Tatham's _Mines_ deals with this in a different way: it generates the mine positions in such a way that they can never lead to an ambiguous state during a game. https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/doc/min...

That's pretty neat. I wonder how it works. It's not obvious to me at all how to build something like this, as the program doesn't know the sequence in which the player will reveal the tiles. I also once made my own variant of this (just like gregfjohnson's idea): A "lucky minesweeper" where luck can be toggled on/off at any point during the game: https://github.com/yshklarov/minesweeper

He's written a bit about how it works here: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/quasiblog/mines....

Re: Minesweeper thermodynamics

#37

Post by jabl »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #34
jabl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is to an extent a party trick to befuddle lay people. Physicists know perfectly well that temperature is not a well-defined concept out of equilibrium. And when in a population inversion experiment when "temperature" is determined to be negative (or "beyond infinite" if you will) it arises because for a short while you have a non-Boltzmannian distribution.

I don't think they were talking about negative temperature, they just mean that sometimes the convenient quantity to work with is β = 1/T.

Oh, right, yes. But that's just because 1/T occurs in many formulas and thus it's often convenient to work with it instead. No exciting new physics hiding there. ;)

Re: Minesweeper thermodynamics

#38

Post by Gravityloss »

maggit wrote: post #24
OscarCunningham wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's NP-complete to decide whether a cell in Minesweeper must be a mine: https://logic.pku.edu.cn/ann_attachments/np.pdf . In practice I suspect a SAT solver would make quick work of the positions that actually appear in games.

There was a Minesweeper on here that used a SAT solver, but I cannot find it at the moment. As I recall, it never had any issue with resolving the board quickly. I think it dynamically resolved where the mines would be as you played the game, and if you clicked a square that could be a mine, it would be a mine, except, I believe, when there were no open squares that were safe. (Edit: Here it is! https://pwmarcz.pl/ka…

I wonder if one learned to play faster with this kind of minesweeper.

I find in a lot of repetitive learning, you have a very noisy signal, you don't know if you succeeded because of luck or you did something right.

This variant takes out the luck part.

Re: Minesweeper thermodynamics

#39

Post by senfiaj »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #17
oerpli wrote: post #14

What would the winrate of a bot doing these calculations be compared to one that doesn't?

The bot at https://mrgris.com/projects/minesweepr/ does these calculations, and has a winrate of 37.8% on expert. I don't know what a more naive bot would achieve.

Is this better compared to an actual expert human?

Re: Minesweeper thermodynamics

#40

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

gregfjohnson wrote: post #4

I hacked up a version of minesweeper that was “forgiving:” if there was no selection that was provably safe, it gave you a safe move. If you picked any square that was not provably a bomb, it would not be a bomb. Typically, as long as you don’t select a number of bombs equal to the number of squares , your first move is safe. I just extended that for the whole game. If you select N-1 bombs, you always win on the firs…

> a version of minesweeper that was “forgiving:”

I think this diminishes the game. Sometimes you just don't have enough information to know for sure. Experiencing this in a low stakes situation like a minesweeper game reminds us that life is like that sometimes and we just have to make a guess and accept the consequences.

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