There are some more advanced solving techniques called Whole substitution. Useful on 99 mines difficulty. By subtracting unknown-location-known-number minefield group to make clues. Something like A OR B (logic OR) has 2 mines A has 1 (A has more blocks so the mine is not yet found) therefore B has 1. And you may find B OR C has 2 therefore C has 1. Sometimes the chain can get pretty far away as there are too many mines blocking the detector to make every clue clear. And the inequality solution in 8:21 middle seg+right block=2 mines middle seg+left block=1 mine therefore left=safe right=mine. By replacing a cells with b cells the change of mine values can be a range of -a to +b. If I find a deadend corner 2 blocks wide (both corner block have 5 unexcavated blocks around) with one saying 1 and the other saying 4 then the 3 more blocks on 4's side are all mines and the more blocks on 1's side are all safe. It's an extremum which only this layout allows such a result.
For people who are first hearing about or learning the rules of Minesweeper in this video, you should know that with most applications you use Minesweeper isn't always solvable, as in you can't always logically deduce the solution as there may be more than one and then you're forced to guess. Just thought of saying this since I didn't know it when I first learned and for a while spent a lot of time trying to figure out some configurations which I now know aren't solvable.
i figured out simpler version of smarter strategy by simple "what if" deduction (didn't understood almost any of the things about connection with sets though). but the final playthrough of the bot was still useful because i found the reverse of my strategy
It took me 6 minutes to realize this random video bestowed upon me by The Algorythm is actually teaching me math. And then suddenly programing. If only it was this entertaining when I was learning.
With your cursor inside the minesweeper window type "XYZZY" then press Shift-Enter and Enter. A white dot should appear in the upper-left corner of the screen. If it turns black, your cursor is resting on a mine. Note: This trick works best if your Windows background is black.
Never bothered with math in minesweeper. I just look at the numbers and use logic and common sense. I clicked on this video because I had hoped that it could solve those pesky little 50/50 situations that appear in almost every (hard) game atleast once or twice. well... I guess even math cant solve those ^^
i enjoy coding so breaking it down into code did actually help me as I can visualize what to do when something happens. i right most of my notes in a sudo code like structure using the common if, if else, and for loops cause those were what I learned on .
I think 5:45 is where knowing math terms helps big time, even then had to re-watch and listen a few times... i seriously hate Maths terms and think the industry has a usability problem that stems from 100 of years ago... I can't think of anything better however! Nice vid.
That is a brilliant point, I never even considered that! Terminology has perhaps the worst form of the curse of knowledge; really slow and obnoxious to learn, really trivial looking back. This is really helpful, I'll absolutely try to incorporate that in future. Thanks very much!
There is one more rule which is often implemented: If the first space that the player chooses is a mine, move that mine somewhere else on the board and return the new board configuration as if that first chosen space was not a mine.
lol it's pretty ironic to me how an algorithm that solves a 33 years old obscure game is enough to "prove you wrong" but the device you used to write this comment on isn't.
I would use a more versatile strategy, albeit maybe slow, that can solve the game optimally even when there is not enough information to surely advance. 1. List all the cases of arrangement of mines. 2. Remove the cases that don't match the numbers being shown on the tiles, as well as cases that don't match the number of remaining mines. 3. If a tile has mine in all of the remaining cases, that tile must have mine. If a tile doesn't have mina in any of the remaining cases, that tile must not have mine. If there is no tile found with those 2 searches, calculate the actual probability of each tile having mine, then open the tile with least probability of having mine. Theoretically, this is the strategy with the best win rate. To make it faster, we would: 1. Apply the basic strategies and other fast strategies while they can be applied. 2. Classify unknown tiles into neighbouring with at least a number, and not neighbouring any number. Then we only need to check all possible arrangements of mines in the neighbouring tiles; if we need to calculate probability, we can add "weight" for each arrangement of mines in the neighbouring tiles by the corresponding numbers of possible arrangements of mines in the non-neighbouring tiles (using the corresponding numbers of remaining mines).
