[HN Gopher] Making Explainable Minesweeper
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       Making Explainable Minesweeper
        
       Author : greentec
       Score  : 10 points
       Date   : 2025-07-06 13:56 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (sublevelgames.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (sublevelgames.github.io)
        
       | greentec wrote:
       | Hello Hacker News!
       | 
       | Thank you for your interest in my previous post. This time, I've
       | written a blog post about the game and the process of creating
       | it.
       | 
       | In the original Minesweeper, there are inevitable 50/50 moments
       | where you have to rely on luck. In the game I created,
       | 'Explainable Minesweeper,' I eliminated these guessing
       | situations. However, I also prevented the maps from becoming too
       | easy! How? By using logical deduction, you can solve puzzles that
       | initially appear to be luck-based. The blog post explains the
       | process in more detail.
        
       | shkkmo wrote:
       | The exclusion of patterns that involve more than 2 numbers is a
       | pretty huge caveat that should be mentioned earlier and more
       | clearly. When I was playing a lot of minesweeper, larger levels
       | tended to require solving larger patterns most of the time. If
       | you exclude those solutions, your estimate of how often you are
       | required to guess is going to be pretty inaccurate.
        
       | npinsker wrote:
       | For what it's worth, the way 14MV does hints is probably by just
       | throwing the board into Z3 (https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3) or
       | some other constraint solver. Microsoft has already done all the
       | hard work for you.
        
         | jsnell wrote:
         | I doubt it. A guaranteed-solveable minesweeper scenario isn't
         | just about the global board setup, but about what information
         | is available when, and what order the solution is gone through.
         | 
         | Bombe[0] is to my mind the definitive exploration of this
         | concept. The tagline is "Minesweeper, but you only solve each
         | situation once", which you do by writing these kinds of
         | deduction rules with a fairly painful visual programming
         | language. (You can't write an invalid rule: the game will
         | detect the logic error and present you with a counter-example.)
         | 
         | You then let the computer churn through it's list of 100k
         | scenarios idle-game style, until you bump into a board that
         | can't be solved with the rules you provided, and you have to
         | figure out what new rules to write.
         | 
         | As the game progresses, you'll unlock ways of parameterizing
         | the rules in various ways, as well as various variant rules.
         | 
         | [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262930/Bombe/
        
       | GLdRH wrote:
       | In minesweeper online there's also a "no guessing" mode which, in
       | my opinion, is much more interesting than the normal mode. It
       | means that if you guess in a situation where you could have
       | deduced the mines, you always get a mine. Conversely, if you
       | really are in a guessing situation, you will never get a mine.
       | I'm pretty sure the game calculates the unknown part of the map
       | after each click anew.
        
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       (page generated 2025-07-09 23:00 UTC)