One Square Minesweeper | Hacker News Reader

One Square Minesweeper

onesquareminesweeper.com

104 pointsnotamy63 comments

Unrealistic; in minesweeper it's impossible to hit a mine on your first click. ;)

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/315335/is-it-poss...

Your link suggests: "If a mine is under the first clicked tile, it is moved to the upper-left corner, if the upper left corner is occupied, the mine moves to the right of the corner tile." If that happened here, the square would still be a mine.

What a convoluted solution.

I always assumed it did things the way I did when I wrote my minesweeper game: it only generated the mines on the first click, avoiding the clicked tile.

I wonder why they did it that way?

Probably performance. It's an old game, it seems faster if the mines can get generated before the user first clicks, and then move the mine if their first click was on a mine. If you wait for them to click to generate then the entire generation step has to run before the user notices.

I don't know for sure, but they probably didn't plant it at first and later it was simpler to move mine elsewhere than to change the way mines are generated.

What if the upper-left corner and the one to its right are mined?

"The function checks if it is the first click, and that the square being clicked is a mine. It then tries to move the mine to the upper-left corner. If unsuccessful it tries the square to the right of it. If all of the first row is occupied by mines, the function tries to put the mine in the leftmost square of the row below, and so on."

https://web.archive.org/web/20180618103640/http://www.techus...

What does the function do if the entire board is mines?

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-REcpPz3vw It causes some strange bugs to occur!

An array out of bounds access.

Found the tester :)

Jokes aside, I love it how in a group of software engineers someone can always think of an even more unlikely, but somehow realistic edge case.

For me, one of the marks of a senior engineer would be to then either go "we'll just not allow the board to be filled with entirely mines in the builder", or "well, if that ever happens: just let it crash". A practical solution to a theoretical case. Whereas the more junior engineer would spend the next few days researching and refactoring the algorithm to address this case. Obv. "it depends", letting my insuline pump "just crash" isn't cool, but minesweeper, meh.

It BSODs!

In Minesweeper you also win when all non-mine tiles are revealed.

It's "an irresistible force meeting an immovable object" type of situation.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

In this case, you win by flagging all the mines. That isn't how winmine worked -- you just had to uncover all non-mine spaces.

It would have been funnier if when you flag it the game turns it into a number and you lose anyway.

you're confusing minesweeper with nuclear disarmament.

For those OOTL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpmGXeAtWUw

Gambling? :)

(-:

I can't get the xyzzy cheat[1] to work. How am I going to tell if there is a bomb or not?

[1]: https://minesweepergame.com/history/xyzzy.php

Oh cool. Also it's really funny that the blog is cutting off the corners on the main image.

Simon Tatham’s minesweeper is the best minesweeper https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/mine...

« The first square you open is guaranteed to be safe, and (by default) you are guaranteed to be able to solve the whole grid by deduction rather than guesswork. »

This game painfully reminds me of my dating attempts as a teenager.

Just flag and you win instantly?

probably also depends on the kind of flag

On the right bottom corner says that it's part of Useless Web Project, https://theuselessweb.com/, which has more interesting "useless" games...

I remember a long time ago (20 years ago?) playing some Windows minesweeper variant that someone had wrote. It did the "impossible to hit a mine on your first click" thing (That I believe Windows' Minesweeper didn't do), but also had different shapes. You could have a hex map, for example.

Anyone know what I'm thinking of?

xbomb? https://www.gedanken.org.uk/software/xbomb/

I can't seem to flag the mine on mobile

That's because it detected you don't have a mouse, or a 386... You are not allowed, it would just be wrong.

Yeah, it's useless.

If you are interested in variants of minesweeper, this one is awesome:

https://magnushoff.com/articles/minesweeper/

(scroll to the bottom)

This web remembers to me the great game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Quest

This was in the thread for useless programs just now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41894765

This is really hard. Anyone got any tips?

Try flagging the mine rather than revealing it! (Right click.)

Holy shit. There's a way to win. Awesome.

Since 1993, that's what I've been missing from my mine sweeper game. All these years I couldn't understand why I could never finish the game. Hahaha! :)

Cool!

There are actually some expert players who intentionally play without the flags as an extra challenge. They have to remember (or re-deduce) where the mines are. The game is considered won whenever the number of unexposed squares, whether explicitly flagged or not, or equal to the total number of mines.

That's what I assumed. But even when I got to the point of no more non-cursed squares, I didn't get the "Cool" glasses. Cry.

Usually this means that you have one more false positive hiding somewhere!

Apparently this game is 3BV 0, so it should be solvable by luck and cannot be used for official records.

Related: I've seen a minesweeper where you solve it not one by one but in general You add rules that are auto-applied wherever they can, and it tries to solve itself

  https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262930/Bombe/
  > Minesweeper, but you only solve each situation once.
  > Regions (number bubbles connected by lines) generated from clues on the board  
  > Rules act on regions to mark bombs, clear squares or create new regions  
  > A checker tells you if your rule is formally correct
  > Rules are auto applied forever after, resolving the situations you have solved before
  > Only the hard situations remain.

This made me laugh unreasonably hard.

It took me four tries to solve it.

Finally a game superior to Flappy Bird. Bravo!

This is like the opposite of that paperclip game (sorry in advance)

Best game since 1D Tetris

There was a 1D Wolfenstein that was entirely played in the url bar, and yet made perfect sense and was quite playable.

By the 5th try I was sure I nearly had it. No such luck! hehehe :)

It doesn't have high scores. Literally unplayable.

One square tetris Is highly needed here!

someone registered a .com for this . At least it was not a .io domain. Those are really expensive.

You know you have that side project mentality when how much the domain name costs is the first consideration XD

From the “useless web” links provided above, I learned:

> The project was built and launched as part of Netlify’s Dusty Domains project, where for each project built and launched on an old domain money was donated to charity! Ultimately over a hundred thousand dollars was raised for a variety of individual charities.

Hopefully not with Gandi, because then they also have a "move domain" entry in their TODO list!

Beep boop beep boop beep boop!

Someone should make one with 0.

I am really good at this.

I feel so successful

Is this modern art?

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