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Comment by frading | Hacker News Reader

Thanks a lot! And yes, the ratio of mines vs clear tiles may not be optimal, and is currently completely random, so guessing may be required at times. But there's an undo button so you won't have to restart a new level if you hit a mine.

But I'd love to remove guessing ultimately. I just haven't found a reliable way to make it work yet, and would need to dedicate a fair amount of hours to it, which I've preferred allocating to the other games on my roadmap. Nevertheless, it still may happen.

Could you maybe try the custom settings? You can change the ratio of mines. I'd be curious to know what quantity of mines you find works best.

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Simon Tatham has a completely guess free minesweeper in his portable puzzle collection: https://git.tartarus.org/?p=simon/puzzles.git;a=blob;f=mines...

The basic idea is he generates a grid, runs it through a deductive solver, and if it fails, heuristically changes the grid a little where it failed and tries again.

I'll try some different ratios and get back to you!

edit: I tried some runs with size 3 and 20% mines, that felt a lot more like expert difficulty Minesweeper too in terms of the sizes of the empty patches you uncover by uncovering a 0.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to check this, that's very useful info.

Although the reason I haven't set 20% as the default, is because I'm concerned this may create too many situations where guessing would be required. So I'd need to have the solver in place. So thank you for the link as well.

Although now, I'm wondering if the solver can be smart enough to allow situations like this, where finding how to progress isn't quite obvious, like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234686

Yeah, I did eventually run into a few guesswork situations. But besides those, it was a lot of fun. On the 20% I really had to stop and think, because all the logic I already knew was there, but subtly different due to the number of neighbours, so new patterns emerged that I had to re-deduce. Still haven't successfully solved one! most of the guesswork I've had to do was around the edges. Maybe going somewhat down from 20% in total and having a smaller percentage around the edges could be a useful temporary heuristic until a potential solver is in place.

I also spotted a bug I think, where when you fail and undo, some of the mines are rendered similar to an empty cell, thereby spoiling where they are. This was on Firefox.

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