h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

minesweeper is such a classy game for when ur really bored, and once u get the knack it aint really all that difficult, however the expert level is near impossible unless ur having a very good day :P. somehow i find the idea of an artificial intelligence that can play minesweeper as very sad, because then we wouldn't have anything to keep us alive when perpetually bored (except freecell [erhaps, another classy windows game) yay for crappy games, theyre always the best.

funny you mention freecell. My father who used to work in the computer industry back in the punch card days works on Badook (or go)
and freecell. He writes the program in his free time. The go one is not very good (like all go programs) (too many possibilities, much more than chess when it starts). and the other is freecell he has been making a program that solves freecell games. Why? because freecell makes the claim that every game is solvable and though he began playing each game(you can put the seed number in) from 1 to about 2,000+ games. He saw that this was going to take too long and stated writing a program to solve the games for him. Not all strategies work and sometimes strategies have to be switch in the middle of the game. But it now solves 30% of the games that have been inputed. Minesweeper is probably easier than go and freecell, in terms of strategy, but will be impossible to find a perfect solution.

wouldnt it be easier just to make a program that would anylize it and tell you whether the clues are sufficint to solve the game? thats still hard but a whole lot less hard than making an AI program just for minesweeper. besides, it wouldnt tell you the solution, just tell you its there, solving the "nothing to do" problem.

Hmm... but you don't have any clues until you start playing, and you don't start playing without making random choices...

I guess it could give the probability of winning given a perfect strategy, hmm, but I would expect that to hover around a fairly constant value for all possible boards... with minor variations.

Interesting problem though.

I had an idea, maby if you stated off with a board with only half the mines on it and every move you make the AI ether adds a mine or moves one, until the max mines is reached, then it just moves things around.

-- DoctorMO --

I'd be interested to know what proportion of minesweeper games can be solved without any guessing (except for the first).

D'oh, just noticed you actually mentioned this in your entry.

hehe, year, I noticed that too.

-- DoctorMO --

I had a nice post giving some actual stats on how often it won at various board sizes... but it seems to've been lost!... I'll see if I can find it...

have you no nick?

-- DoctorMO --

Nick?

26199 is no nick, unless your some kind of clone.

-- DoctorMO --

It is too! I've used it for... hmm... several years now...

what does it mean?

-- DoctorMO --

It doesn't mean anything... actually it's my researcher number.

The intention is that I should say interesting enough things to be noticed without having to have an impressive nickname

I also like being different

fair enough, although I supose we all pick our nicks for some kind of impresion, /I hope mine just tells people a bit about me.

-- DoctorMO --

dito

Er... huh?

It's a way of bringing your atention back to the thread, because I thought it was a bit crule to leave me hanging.

No harm ment, though.

-- DoctorMO --

*irrelevent interjection*

Here at college we have a saying: "Minesweeper: it's not just a game; it's a way of life."