Yes. Well this is one load off of my mind as I’ve been playing Minesweeper on the Expert difficulty all week long and was not sure that I’d ever beat it. I can not tell you how much time I sunk into this effort or how many times I played it. I imagine that I played on expert mode upwards of a thousand times but the majority of those times were making “random” clicks at the start of games which often resulted in failure. I’m not sure what finally got me over the hump although yesterday I was probably on track to win a few times but I kept making mistakes due to fatigue (yes I played it that much, my hands are killing me from ambi-clumsy (I coined that term) play). Possibly it improved things when I stopped listening to old episodes of A State of Trance with Armin van Buuren and started listening to some of Hirano Aya’s various anime music. Why this should be I can not tell you but I’m pretty sure I was listening to Bouken de-sho de-sho from Haruhi when I won. {now that I think about it there is a better chance it was I’m Ice Cream or Breakthrough Perhaps this is the true nature of my Otaku Spirit オタク魂. It’s gotten me this far into trouble so I guess it will just keep on digging me into a hole until I either break through to the other side or it all collapses on me. Actually that reminds me of the shelving in my room which is by my bed and overloaded with volumes of manga (tankoubon 単行本). Sometimes I worry that it will crush me in my sleep. This is not outside the realm of possibility, and might be a fittingly ignominious end to my consistently ignominious life.
And so I now enter into the elite echelons of people who have wasted a lot of time by being one of the few to accomplish this feat. I honestly have never known anyone else personally in my life to have beaten Minesweeper on expert mode. That doesn’t mean that no one did, in particular I can think of a few people who might have, it just isn’t something that ever came up.
My embarrassing times are as follows Beginner: 37 seconds Intermediate: 163 seconds Expert: 815 seconds. that’s right, it took me almost 14 minutes to get through it. That is nothing compared to the hours I sat with laptop in place, navigating the board with the fucking touch pad. I think I could have shaved that time considerably with a normal mouse. A consideration.
Well as far as I know you don’t get anything when you win except the ability to put your name in if you get the fastest time score. The little smiley at the top of the board that lets you reset puts shades on but that’s the same for all modes. No, all you get for completing it is a dirty sense of accomplishment brought forth from hours of toil. Of course a lot of people who beat it probably “get lucky” and aren’t forced to make a guess with a 2 out of 3 chance of failing when they only have 7 mines left…
So for all those of you out there who have never beaten Minesweeper: don’t bother. The luckiest people are those who have never played it. But if you want some tips, now that I’ve finally beaten it I feel qualified to give a few.
First of all, making guesses is inevitable. The first click you make will never be a mine, the game is programmed this way. I’m playing the “old” version of Minesweeper by the way, not one of those fancy ones that only has patterns that don’t force guesses. So since you have to make guesses you might as well make a lot of wild guesses at the start. I tried playing numerous ways but the time I finally won was a result of that strategy. Click on tiles in all general areas of the board, you might as well open up at least one if not two clearings, it is extremely difficult to get far without openings in all quadrants of the board.
Following that strategy you are unlikely to last for 10 seconds. But what’s worse, wasting a minute trying to get good positioning, or being near completion and having it all blow up because you’re forced to make a weird guess. The latter at least is more frustrating for me.
As far as math goes, there is better than a 20% chance of clicking on a mine (99 mines divided by 480 tiles times 100 is 20.625%) in general which is 1 in 5. So when you open up a 1 tile your chances are a lot better at 1 in 8. This is something to keep in mind when you’re faced with 2/3 odds of clicking on a mine but there are a lot of unopened tiles around.
Other than that, starting games off with a lot of guesses and having no clear options, never make a guess unless you’ll have to make it eventually. What I mean by that is, if you get an isolated formation of say 20-30 blocks and you will have to make a guess in order to crack into it, you might as well do that as soon as it becomes apparent rather than spend 5 minutes clearing out the rest of the board only to click on a mine. If nothing is isolated and blocked off though, then wait until later to make a guess, usually things become apparent. Also make sure you can actually recognize when you don’t have to guess. Sometimes the layout of mines becomes apparent from 3 touching tiles. The best example I can think of, assuming none of these tiles are touching marked spots already, is a 121 layout near a side of the board, the mines will always be in front of the 1. It becomes harder to distinguish such things when you’re dealing with tiles between two rows (in other words, when more than 3 tiles touching it haven’t been opened) but if you consider it for a while the answer might become apparent. As you can tell from my times I spend plenty of time considering such things while playing Minesweeper.
Alright well, that was all I wanted to say. I guess this is bragging or gloating or something but let me assure you I am not proud of this accomplishment. Mostly I just felt like after dumping all those hours I might as well say something about it. I don’t think that beating Minesweeper is a requirement for mastering math, but beating Minesweeper even though the odds were always against me (I don’t know what the actual odds of completing a game are but considering that I’ve only done it once out of more than a thousand times playing it they certainly were poor for me) makes me think that if I persevere I can get through math too. Now whether or not I’ll ever do anything meaningful with math is still up in the air but that can probably wait a couple of years. Well hey now that I say that, is it really going to take me that long? I guess it will, maybe I could skip having to take certain classes if I did more math work on my own. Hmm at that rate is statistics really something relevant to me? Oh wait you don’t have to pass algebra to take calculus? hmm…. OK that just wasn’t true at all. But apparently after Algebra I could take other types of math at the same time. I do not know of any reason why I wouldn’t want to do that. Then again I don’t know much about math.
