Hacker News Reader

Comment by mminer237 | Hacker News Reader

Neat. Does this ensure there's no 50/50 guesses needed then? That seems easier when you can split a square in two.

It doesn't sadly. I had tried to implement that, but couldn't find a provable way to prevent 50/50. It's especially trickier as I can't use an algo with just rows and columns, it has to work on a graph. And it would need to be fast enough as to not slow the grid generation (which already takes a few seconds on the maximum size). So I'd love to add this ultimately, but not entirely sure I'll have the resources.

Also though they are rare, there are some nasty beginnings too, like this one: https://imgur.com/a/tjHg5if

I might be overlooking something tho.

You are overlooking something ;)

The 1s on the little concave bit mean you know where the nearest 2's second flag should go, even though you don't know yet where the 1 is. Then that gives you some to clear.

ah yes, it's a nasty one. I can't see an obvious way to progress without luck either.

There are definitely ways to progress from here, but they may be more advanced?

The 1 SouthEast of the bottom 2 touches two tiles, and the 1 immediately West touches a superset of those two. The difference between the larger and smaller set must be clear. And you can go further off of that.

ah yes, very well spotted! as the dev, I should really have seen that.

But also it’s not really a requirement, original Windows minesweeper doesn’t have that, so it’s kind expected to have to try your luck sometimes.

It makes the game way better in my experience(not having any probabilistic decisions to make). Once I started playing Simon Tatham's version I started picking up all sorts of tricks I hadn't thought of before, simply because I knew a solution must exist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com