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

I made a simple minesweeper game with a "Suggest Move" button which uses propositional logic inference to come up with a suggested move. The program is available at http://barnesc.blogspot.com/2006/08/intelligent-minesweeper.html . The advantage in taking this approach is that the AI player is deterministically perfect: the AI can never make mistakes, and will always suggest a move if it can be mathematically deduced that any square is empty. (Deterministic means that the AI will always make a single move from a given visible minesweeper board, and nondeterministic means that the AI will choose moves probabilistically). The disadvantage is that for my propositional inference algorithm, for large board sizes the "Suggest Move" button will cause the computer to grind to a halt. The program defaults to a 9x9 grid with 10 mines. Also, note that a "perfect deterministic player" is not the same thing as a "perfect player" in minesweeper -- if no provable information can be deduced about the location of the mines, then statistically inferred information can be used instead. A real "perfect player" would move deterministically when it can deduce that a square is empty, and probabilistically according to the set of all possible mine configurations otherwise. - Connelly Barnes