Hacker News Reader

Comment by ysavir | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't say it's "easier", since random chance of failure isn't a difficulty level, it's a lack of difficulty: Your gameplay has no effect on the outcome.

If anything, this is Minesweeper as it should have been: A game of perception and deduction with no chance of random failure.

As a huge minesweeper fan, I think this is fantastic.

View on HN

Yes. I've always bemoaned the fact that people's first experience with the game is the one bundled in Windows. Because the player knows the game sometimes requires guessing, they never learn which situations actually require guessing and which are actually solvable; they just decide they need to guess because there is no number surrounded by the same number of empty squares, and never discover the math about possibilities that the game requires.

I used to play a version that was guaranteed to never require guessing [1], but it was still possible to accidentally make an unnecessary guess and not be punished for it. TFA's variant is a great way to fix that problem.

[1]: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/ "Mines"

I learned on Windows and 1. Never guessed if avoidable, 2. If guessing always considered both odds and potential reward for each option, at least heuristically. I feel in this context for saying "never" you deserve to click a mine ;-)

> 2. If guessing always considered both odds and potential reward for each option, at least heuristically.

Same here. To add a pinch to this, say there are two regions of the visible board that must be answered by guessing. If one has 1-in-3 odds of failure, and the other has 2-in-3 odds of failure, then make the guess on the one with better chances.

I would kinda like to see this approach (Kaboom) combined with Simon Tatham's version. Basically, add the guarantee that you can solve each one without guessing. Or, add instant death when you open a square that wasn't guaranteed safe to Simon Tatham's version. I think I would like that significantly better: I like the guarantee that each one can be solved, but I want to be punished when I incorrectly open a square that wasn't safe.

It's "easier" in the sense that with normal Minesweeper you'd win less than 50% of the time, but with this you win 100% of the time. I agree, with normal Minesweeper I'd play "provably correctly" but then lose when I had to guess, with this I don't have to.

In complex situations it is easy to come to the conclusion that you have to guess, but sometimes there is an elaborate connection you might have missed. This game is sure to call you out on any mistakes you make of this kind.

That would at least make this game more strict and perhaps even more difficult.

I tend to solve Minesweeper locally as much as possible, solving cordoned off sections where the answer doesn't rely on the rest of the board. A major benefit to doing it this way in traditional implementations is that if I'm forced to guess, the sooner I make an incorrect guess the sooner I move on to a solvable map.

While trying this out I've encountered several sections where I would have to guess, and that guess cannot be influenced by other unrevealed cells, such as when there's an island in a corner of the map.

In these situations I will need to guess between these two spaces, but since there are still known safe areas on the map, guessing causes me to lose the game.

I can get used to that behavior of course, but it's fairly frustrating. It'd be nice if the guessing exception rules accounted for situations like this. When there are clearings or known mine patterns that separate out discrete smaller map(s), I want to solve the smaller map(s) before I move on.

Agreed, I'd like this to go one step further and allow you to guess on a square where you will inevitably have to guess anyway.

I'm not sure how hard this is to add to the SAT solver. The formal definition is something like "if for some set of maybe-squares S, no matter what the solutions are to all of the squares outside S, the set of solutions to S is the same, then allow clicking anywhere in S". But that's a combinatorial explosion: just the number of sets S to consider is a factor of 2^#{maybe-squares} . I don't know enough to say if that can be optimized into something sane so that it can be rigorously applied, but a handful of special cases for small unconnected sections of the board would cover most of it.

> I'd like this to go one step further and allow you to guess on a square where you will inevitably have to guess anyway.

If you have all of the possible information for that guess already, then yeah.

If there are still some unknowns that you could resolve first to get more information, then guessing should still result in a mine.

Yeah, that's what I meant really, as per my attempt to formalize it.

I can't think of any situations where it makes a difference, though, other than ones where you rely on the mines-remaining counter.

I think we're in the same boat. Even though it's billed as more punishing, it's actually just significantly more fair.

I'm not entirely sure the software's working correctly. I lost my first game, and I'm fairly certain that there was a different possible orientation of mines: https://imgur.com/gallery/hg1Mcwq

There were other possibilities, but you were punished for taking a guess when there were guaranteed-safe squares. Guessing is only supposed to be safe when you have to do it.

I'll label your sequence of 2, 3, 4, 2, 2 as 2a, 3b, 4c, 2d, and 2e, respectively. Although the exact configuration around 4c was not decided, 4c necessarily provided all of the mines for 2d, leaving 2e open along with the squares above and below 2e. Therefore, the game expected you to choose 2e, the squares above and below 2e, and the square above 2a, before you were allowed to take a guess.

This is such a cool version of this game!

In your screenshot, look at the green squares. Those are the spaces that are guaranteed to be safe based on the available information. The game wants you to click those before you do anything else.

Once there are no more guaranteed squares anywhere on the board, then you can guess. And if you guess somewhere that could be valid, it will be valid. But only if there are no other guaranteed spaces left.

hatwash answered why the two green squares above and below the right-most 2 were safe. Here's why the top-left and bottom-left squares were safe:

    a b c d
    2 3 4 2
    0 e f g

Because of the left-most 2, only two of a,b,e are mines.

That means only one of c,f is a mine - the third mine of the 3.

That means only three of b,d,e,g are mines - the remaining three mines of the 4.

But both d and g cannot be mines, because combined with the one mine in c,f that would put three mines around the right 2. So only one of d,g is a mine.

So if only one of c,f is a mine, and only one of d,g is a mine, that means b,e are both mines - the remaining two mines of the 4. So b,e can be flagged as mines.

That means the left 2 is complete, so a can be opened safely. Also the mine at e completes the bottom-most 1, and you can proceed from there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com