In a similar vein: Cheating Hangman, once described as "an app that perfectly recreates the infuriating feeling of playing hangman with your older sibling who was <i>definitely</i> cheating and also knew way more words than you". <a href="https://cheatman.danq.me/" rel="nofollow">https://cheatman.danq.me/</a><p>Implementation details: <a href="https://danq.me/2019/09/26/cheatman/" rel="nofollow">https://danq.me/2019/09/26/cheatman/</a>
This seems like a MUCH easier version of Minesweeper, purely due to the fact that when you're down to guessing it's guaranteed to be safe.<p>That is an excellent idea, I'm going to have to try this and see if I'm really as good at Minesweeper as I think or if I just get lucky sometimes on unproven squares.<p>Also somewhat relevant, there's a recent Minesweeper roguelike that recently came out on Steam: <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1141220/DemonCrawl/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/1141220/DemonCrawl/</a>
It's amazing how good this is for training!<p>Apparently I am not that great at minesweeper and guess way too often when it's not necessary. This variation kills those bad habits pretty quickly by punishing you 100% of the time for guessing. Along with undo and double checking with the debugger, I've picked up way more patterns/heuristics than in my years of playing.<p>Coolest thing is that if you're a perfect logician you can always win!<p>Link to actual game since it's not prominent in article: <a href="https://pwmarcz.pl/kaboom/" rel="nofollow">https://pwmarcz.pl/kaboom/</a>
Great read!<p>It's in a similar vein as the variant I developed, which makes you declare that you are in a situation that requires a guess. I don't use an SAT solver, and I prepopulate the board.<p><a href="https://magnushoff.com/articles/minesweeper/" rel="nofollow">https://magnushoff.com/articles/minesweeper/</a><p>In comparison to the Simon Tatham version mentioned at the end of the article, my game allows all game configurations while Tatham's version guarantees solvability by restricting the possible configurations.
> One of the bottom squares contain a mine, but it's impossible to say which one. You have to select one of them. But according to what I just said, that would mean certain death! I wanted the game to be cruel, but now it's unwinnable.<p>If it's not stalemate, haven't you won at that point? The tiles are practically in a state of quantum superposition where they are both safe and unsafe at the same time. You can't know without observing.<p>Except... the game rules say they're both mines if they're uncertain (in that version of the game), so the player has won because the game has been backed into a corner.<p>If there's a way to make that situation truly unpredictable, I'd be amazed. For example, if it was networked and another player worked a similar board, but they clicked one of the same tiles. So your clicking of a tile is the observation of what happened in someone else's game as opposed to a random calculation or game logic.
Quote: "Recently, I had an idea: what if you had to play Minesweeper against the computer?"<p>For me that statement means player 2 played by computer. What he actually implemented is not that. Which gave me the idea to actually do that. Same rules as classic one, you click, another human click (or computer player) - loser is the one who reveals a bomb. In case nobody blows up winner is the one who is last to flag correctly a bomb on a guessing situation.<p>Ideas, constructive criticism is welcome. What you guys say?
As far as I understand this has been done more than 15 years ago by the "Mines Perfect" game [0], which is open source IIRC. In this case you'd use the Lucky Mode and the Murphy's Law option (although more modes are available). And no SAT solver was used in that game, I think, which to me is more impressive, although perhaps less elegant.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.czeppi.de/english/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.czeppi.de/english/index.html</a>
How can I choose which square has the mine without guessing here?<p><a href="https://imgur.com/gallery/GlAgExv" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/gallery/GlAgExv</a>
This reminds me a bit of the discussions around designing Quantum Minesweeper. Where you are playing N classical games in superposition. And the player is allowed to make "classical" or "entangled" choices. The ability to probe non-locally opens up interesting possibilities. See Qiskit for demo ;)<p>If you are craving a quick game, there is a Chrome Labs PWA implementation called Proxx that works on all devices<p><a href="https://proxx.app/" rel="nofollow">https://proxx.app/</a>
Given that guessing is always safe when it's required, it means you have a choice in e.g. the initial play. Is it more efficient to click tiles on a line, or to click them in a cluster?
Why a SAT solver? Constraint propagation with backtracking and arc consistency checks is very fast for minesweeper (source: this was an old Stanford CS homework problem), and it’s fairly straightforward to re-solve with added constraints to ask questions like “could there be a mine here”.<p>In general, the Kaboom game logic seems to be nearly identical to writing an optimal minesweeper solver.
While playing this, I had an idea. What if marking the mine reduced the number of any number tiles adjacent to the mine? So the number tile would show the number of adjacent mines, minus the number of adjacent flags. Then you could work through the puzzle by bringing all the number tiles to 0, which might make certain situations more readily soluble.
> One of the bottom squares contain a mine, but it's impossible to say which one. You have to select one of them. But according to what I just said, that would mean certain death! I wanted the game to be cruel, but now it's unwinnable. So I'll modify the idea a bit and say you are allowed to guess, but only if there are no safe squares left. This way, the game will be cruel, but fair.<p>The situation when your only move possible is a guess is exactly the same we have in the very beginning of the game so I would rather make such fields guaranteed safe the way the first click is.
Super cool! I was playing with a friend and found the interesting strategy of minimizing the information available to us and trying to force as many guesses as possible. Start from the corners, and whenever you have to guess, guess in a way that limits you (for example, guessing to cover all your edges with known mines). Then, since you don't have any options, you get a "free" space to continue! And with the free space, you pick a different corner...
Beautiful solution with the binomial encoding. Apparently, "at most k" is a well known problem <a href="http://www.sat4j.org/maven233/apidocs/org/sat4j/tools/encoding/Binomial.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.sat4j.org/maven233/apidocs/org/sat4j/tools/encodi...</a>
I have been playing this obsessively the last few weeks without knowing about the implementation. I thought it expresses the known facts about the board configuration as a system of linear equations and uses one of the classic algorithms for solving these. Anyone know if that would be infeasible for some reason?
The ability to choose where mines aren't can yield some funny results. My goal is now to force as many mines as possible in the upper left corner. <a href="https://imgur.com/a/X1zxwdO" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/X1zxwdO</a>
At first I thought it’s a variation of the old Atari game of the same name [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaboom!_(video_game)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaboom!_(video_game)</a>
The original minesweeper had a smiley face up the top, which would turn dead if you lost, and would have a :o face while picking a cell.<p>Having the face change if there are safe cells available would give the face a purpose.
See also the author's blog post about how he built it: <a href="https://pwmarcz.pl/blog/kaboom/" rel="nofollow">https://pwmarcz.pl/blog/kaboom/</a>