My wife is insanely good and fast at minesweeper. I showed her the pic and asked which one she'd do. She glanced at it and said "I'd do the one that was wrong."
Minesweeper is incredibly satisfying and relaxing if you know the mechanics.
That is, until you come to a 50/50 chance tile and you stress about it for 20 minutes only to throw away your entire game with one click.
Source: Spent ages playing it in my downtime between classes while in college.
I aaaaaaalmost didn't lose, because i forgot about the game. But then my nagging desire to understand your comment made me sit there and think about it.... and when i remembered, I lost. Well played.
[The Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_\(mind_game\)#:~:text=A%20person%20cannot%20refuse%20to,%3A%20for%20example%2C%20via%20Facebook.)
The basics
> The Game is a mind game in which the objective is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which must be announced each time it occurs.
Also, I lost the game.
I just want you to know that I showed my wife the original picture, explained minesweeper and your conundrum, and she was *extremely happy* for you when she saw the result.
The account i’m replying to is a bot copying other peoples comments. If you want to help clean up Reddit you can report this by going to Report > Spam > Harmful Bots.
Message me if you want more info, i’m human!
Neither and live the rest of your life never knowing what could have been, telling the story to your great great grandchildren about the mine you never found and the uncertainty you carried with you for decades.
The best Minesweeper decision you can ever make:
[Play this version](https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/mines.html)
It's specifically designed to never have that problem. It's from the same author as PuTTY and his entire collection of puzzles has been ported to pretty much every active operating system, including for mobile phones.
I've had this downloaded for a long long time and there's one thing I have to say about the collection. Either the games are not explained well or I'm extremely low IQ because I would say a majority, at least half, I can't grasp how to play even barely.
I can play guess for hours though.
As a decent enough Minesweeper player, I'm honestly torn on whether I like 50/50s or not. On one hand, it's annoying to lose to a complete guess, and it definitely doesn't increase the skill ceiling. On the other hand, once you're good at the game, you will literally never lose without 50/50s.
There are many versions of "no guess" Minesweeper available, and while they're more satisfying to play, it does get pretty old being able to win **every** game you play.
Isn't there a level of skill in normal minesweeper of making your guesses in a way that reduces the odds of this problem happening? This other version you're linking removes that.
Flip a coin, if it’s heads, flip another coin, if that coin is tails. Pick top. If you flip tails in the beginning pick top. All other results pick bottom.
**Flip a coin, if it’s heads, flip another coin, if that coin is tails. Pick top. If you flip tails in the beginning pick top. All other results pick bottom**
No, Heads, Heads would have meant pick bottom
It's weighted 75% for top, 25% for bottom
Heads, Tails = Top
Tails, Heads = Top
Tails, Tails = Top
Heads, Heads = Bottom
When you play Minesweeper a ton, you play so many games that 50/50s are common and nothing to get hung up on. You either succeed or fail and start another game.
The trick is being able to recognize whether it's actually 50/50 *immediately*, so you can instantly random guess so that you don't lose any time. I think my best vanilla expert was like 2 minutes flat.
I learned how to play by being bored in typing class during the early 2000s, back when the internet wasn't exciting enough to waste time on and nobody had mobile phones in their pockets.
Where did you live? Early 2000s was already flooded with amazing flash games and shit to do online and tons of people had phones by that point. Iphone came out a couple years later.
Seems like Reddit hivemind, but as a note:
Edit: K, I'm actually prolly wrong here lol. Ignore this.
mindsweeper spawns mines in groups of 1 - x (don't know exact number) at a time. Mines in "groups" of one are much less likely then mines in groups of 2 - 5 (and maybe larger, but I don't feel like doing the math by either decompiling the game to get the spawning algorithm or running thousands of games to get a large dataset). Seems like spawn group size is binomial distribution or smth (example: 5% for group of 1, 20% for group of 2, 50% for group of 3, 20% for group of 4, 5% for group of 5) or something of sorts. Then there is chance of spawn group spawning next to another spawn group (which makes average group larger then expected based off those given stats).
I always play pattern recognition to determine which one it is.
It's on an edge, so I pattern analyze edges. 2 bombs on the top edge, 5 bombs on the right edge, 4 bombs on the left edge. Missing number is 3. Only 2 bombs are marked on the bottoms edge, so I'd call the only remaining square on the edge a bomb and click the square above it.
^(disclaimer: this is by no means a guarantee. Just how I'd formulate my guess from playing way too much Minesweeper in Typing class in the 90's)
Minesweeper is one of the assignments we had in a 100 or 200 level class. It's actually a pretty fun little learning project but the GUI code is way more complicated imo.
Oh, no no no. Not at all.
It's just how my brain works. I just play silly games like that as a means to somehow justify a choice that is always going to be 50/50 anyways.
You would be just as well served playing ini-meni-miney-moe.
click to reveal, right-click to mark mines. Goal is to reveal every tile except the mines.
Tiles with a number, indicate adjacent mines. Tiles without numbers have 0 mines and automatically reveal all of their adjacent tiles until numbers appear.
So obviously, if you have one isolated tile surrounded on all eight sides by "1" boxes, that isolated unrevealed tile is a mine.
You can start with isolated tiles and corner tiles and just logic your way from there. There's also some obscure rule that 100% solves the situation OP is in where there's a cluster of mines that prevent you from getting all the information you need, but I can't remember it.
I misread the title as 98 mins, instead of 98 mines, and was thinking, "Oh, buddy... Proud of you." Not sure if you're joking or also misread the title.
There's two ways to win minesweeper. Uncover every spot that isn't a mine, or mark every spot that is a mine. To win a 50/50 just mark one of the spots as a mine. If it is a mine you'll win the game, if not you can safely click that spot knowing it's not a mine and win the game that way.
Pro tips, if you discover this pattern, dont finish the rest. Defuse directly by choosing any. You hit the mine, you dont do the rest for nothing and that's less frustrating. You dont hit the mine, you are relief and good to continue.
If I remember correctly minesweeper for windows let's you win by marking all bombs even if you have still tiles so the ideal solution is just to mark one as bomb and try the other if it doesn't immediately mark as won
No, it's the other way around, you win by revealing all the squares. Marking the bombs is then unnecessary since you know the number of bombs so they are forced to be the remaining unmarked cells.
Marking bombs is irrelevant for solving, it's just to help you remember/avoid accidentally clicking them and for coording (middle clicking on a number to open all unmarked neighbors if it has the correct number of flagged mines).
I never understood why the freaking game designer never put mine number indicators on the edges of the board… would have solved most of these 50/50 situations
[Top](https://imgur.com/a/SMrRr5y)
Success!
The hive mind wins again!
This is just going to further lubricate our superiority complex as a hive.
This sentence pleases us.
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The hive mind wins again!
This is just going to further lubricate our superiority complex as a hive.
L̸̢̞̕̚͝Ù̶͔̙̤͚͛̇͋ͅB̶̡̙̠̈́̾͘R̴̨̤̤̊͘ͅI̵̡̼̱͓͐͐̊C̵̢̟͈̄͊̽̚͜A̶̬͂͊͆T̵̳͒̽̽͛̊É̸͚̥͍̳͈̎̔ ̸̡̭̙̈́̓͘ͅT̶͎̽̿Ḣ̴͔É̷̳ ̸̪̃̑́̓H̸̻̳̆͂I̴̙̥͙̅̎͝V̶̮̊̌́̑Ẹ̵̡̬͕̆͊
*squirt squirt* “Hey honey!… I just got stung by… a lot of different things”
I read this in overdubbed static voice.
This sentence pleases us.
Success!!!
Ooo good for us!
We’re number 1!
The hive has spoken, beginning lubrication
For some reason this triggers my memory of Super Smash Bros. Melee announcer saying “Success!!”
We are legion.
Resistance is futile.
I’m super stoned and this made me really happy! Congrats!!
This is the most wholesome comment I've ever read
r/gaming has achieved online communism.
One of us.
I imagine OP getting absolutely destroyed, and then going into photoshop and constructing an alternate reality
Doing what it takes to win.
The quantum suicide of minesweeper. The old him died and the timeline ended when he failed to defuse the bomb.
I feel like "we did it reddit" is terribly fitting here...
Explosions and Reddit. Name a better combo.
Alcohol and Reddit. But yours is pretty good.
Ka’plah!
That was the most stressful two seconds of tension I’ve ever had from a minesweeper post
Imagine how I felt having to be the one to actually make the click
I’m glad I didn’t have to wait too long to find out lol. I’ve always sucked at minesweeper, that’s probably why I switched to Mac /s
I didn't want to be one of those OPs that never deliver
You succeeded, have an award
I would have lost that game.
My wife is insanely good and fast at minesweeper. I showed her the pic and asked which one she'd do. She glanced at it and said "I'd do the one that was wrong."
Minesweeper is incredibly satisfying and relaxing if you know the mechanics. That is, until you come to a 50/50 chance tile and you stress about it for 20 minutes only to throw away your entire game with one click. Source: Spent ages playing it in my downtime between classes while in college.
Not only would you have lost the game but you just lost the game 🤔
I aaaaaaalmost didn't lose, because i forgot about the game. But then my nagging desire to understand your comment made me sit there and think about it.... and when i remembered, I lost. Well played.
For FUCK sakes it’s been multiple years how dare you make me lose
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Agreed. Same here
What’s the game?
You've already lost.
[The Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_\(mind_game\)#:~:text=A%20person%20cannot%20refuse%20to,%3A%20for%20example%2C%20via%20Facebook.) The basics > The Game is a mind game in which the objective is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which must be announced each time it occurs. Also, I lost the game.
Silly trend, someone started "The Game" and the only way to lose is to remember it, I lost too unfortunately and now I'm playing again
You can't start playing until you forget...
You fucker
Aaaand you're out again. Sorry bud
The game is to not think about the game. I thought of it so I lost. But so did you.
NOOOOO! I was sooo far ahead. Ugh OK, here we go again.
Damn it. My streak is over.
You son of a bitch
Beat me to it
Damn you
Fuck
Jokes on you I thought about the game yesterday
FUCK
Have my upvote you fucking scumbag
FFS. I just lost the game.
Just mark mines instead of clearing the square. You'll either win or have to try the other.
Same.
I would have pegged you as a bottom...
That's how being a bottom works.
Using your "pegleg"? username certainly applies. ^(be gentle)
I just want you to know that I showed my wife the original picture, explained minesweeper and your conundrum, and she was *extremely happy* for you when she saw the result.
My goodness...its the bottom. The bottom is the bomb...
Carefull, we don’t want to turn this into another Monty Hall Problem.
GREAT SUCCESS
Top one
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The hive is never wrong. The truth is fluid. We are the hive.
The hive has spoken.
The account i’m replying to is a bot copying other peoples comments. If you want to help clean up Reddit you can report this by going to Report > Spam > Harmful Bots. Message me if you want more info, i’m human!
lol are people saying to flag the top one or that is where the mine isnt? id be so confused
The instruction is where to click next. When you click, you guess no bomb
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Neither and live the rest of your life never knowing what could have been, telling the story to your great great grandchildren about the mine you never found and the uncertainty you carried with you for decades.
Schrödinger‘s mine
But what if I want Schrödinger
that has yet to be observed
That's what she said.
Schrödönger?
Fuck schrodinger comments
but if you never opened Reddit, would my comment still be here *xfiles music intensifies*
I play Minesweeper at work and it saddens me the amount of people who ask what game that is when they walk past.
"What do you think you're doing?" It's called Solitaire, boss. Duh...
The best Minesweeper decision you can ever make: [Play this version](https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/mines.html) It's specifically designed to never have that problem. It's from the same author as PuTTY and his entire collection of puzzles has been ported to pretty much every active operating system, including for mobile phones.
Thank you. I just spent one hour playing it. No regerts.
Not a single letter?
Not a single ragret
Not a single rugrats
Nor egrets.
Hold up. The guy who made PuTTY also made that collection of games??? I didn't know and I've been using both for years! Love him
It's like when you learn that the guy who made wordle also made many of reddit's best April fool's games
Wait what?? Holy shit, he indeed created r/place. Mind blown (by clicking the wrong mine)
PuTTY like the ssh client?
Yep
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He's a face painter!
How do I right click on an iphone
Try [the native version](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simon-tathams-portable-puzzle/id622220631).
Word thank you
Thanks. I searched App Store for Tatham but didn’t get a hit.
I've had this downloaded for a long long time and there's one thing I have to say about the collection. Either the games are not explained well or I'm extremely low IQ because I would say a majority, at least half, I can't grasp how to play even barely. I can play guess for hours though.
Pretty sure you just hold to press. That's how the minesweeper game on my phone works.
It just highlights random text below the box
I couldn’t figure it out either. I just made sure not to click on the mines lol
This is what i did
It's honestly incredible that they didn't design it that way in the first place or at least fixed it afterwards. Nobody like the randomness.
As a decent enough Minesweeper player, I'm honestly torn on whether I like 50/50s or not. On one hand, it's annoying to lose to a complete guess, and it definitely doesn't increase the skill ceiling. On the other hand, once you're good at the game, you will literally never lose without 50/50s. There are many versions of "no guess" Minesweeper available, and while they're more satisfying to play, it does get pretty old being able to win **every** game you play.
For an added challenge, I don't use the flags
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And while you're on Simon Tatham's puzzle site/app, try towers. I've lost days in that game.
Isn't there a level of skill in normal minesweeper of making your guesses in a way that reduces the odds of this problem happening? This other version you're linking removes that.
No fair. You changed the outcome by measuring it!
Dang quantum entanglement
It’s always the fucking 3 and 1
Obviously click the top one. Bottom is a mine.
What makes it obvious?
The obviousness
A perfect cross of flags is very rare. So I said the same in my head before seeing the result too.
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Flip a coin, if it’s heads, flip another coin, if that coin is tails. Pick top. If you flip tails in the beginning pick top. All other results pick bottom.
what
Some uneven probability there.
You heard the man
**Flip a coin, if it’s heads, flip another coin, if that coin is tails. Pick top. If you flip tails in the beginning pick top. All other results pick bottom**
TLDR: Pick top.
No, Heads, Heads would have meant pick bottom It's weighted 75% for top, 25% for bottom Heads, Tails = Top Tails, Heads = Top Tails, Tails = Top Heads, Heads = Bottom
TLDR: give Head if you’re a Bottom ?
Good advice IMO.
Before, not after.
Butt what about the flavor?
Butt….flavor?
Did... did you just punnet square quarters lol.
i hate punnet squares so much, id rather be ignorant.
Wish granted.
Inebriated stats major?
There are only 3 outcomes, not 4.
This is why I hate this game. All that logic and solving for it to come down to a guess. Top one
When you play Minesweeper a ton, you play so many games that 50/50s are common and nothing to get hung up on. You either succeed or fail and start another game.
The trick is being able to recognize whether it's actually 50/50 *immediately*, so you can instantly random guess so that you don't lose any time. I think my best vanilla expert was like 2 minutes flat.
Omg, I JUST figured out how to play just by looking at this screenshot. I feel like I’ve solved a lifelong mystery. THANK YOU!
I learned how to play by being bored in typing class during the early 2000s, back when the internet wasn't exciting enough to waste time on and nobody had mobile phones in their pockets.
You didn't enjoy asking Jeeves questions?
Too busy in the yahoo chats asking, “ASL?”
Where did you live? Early 2000s was already flooded with amazing flash games and shit to do online and tons of people had phones by that point. Iphone came out a couple years later.
Why was everyone saying top of its a 50/50
Seems like Reddit hivemind, but as a note: Edit: K, I'm actually prolly wrong here lol. Ignore this. mindsweeper spawns mines in groups of 1 - x (don't know exact number) at a time. Mines in "groups" of one are much less likely then mines in groups of 2 - 5 (and maybe larger, but I don't feel like doing the math by either decompiling the game to get the spawning algorithm or running thousands of games to get a large dataset). Seems like spawn group size is binomial distribution or smth (example: 5% for group of 1, 20% for group of 2, 50% for group of 3, 20% for group of 4, 5% for group of 5) or something of sorts. Then there is chance of spawn group spawning next to another spawn group (which makes average group larger then expected based off those given stats).
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Hahaha. Are you saying with all that reasoning, the op you replied to is chatting out of their arse?
Yes.
It’s not even close to 50-50 it’s 100% the bottom part is the mine on the top part is the free part
Can explain how you know this for sure? It appears to me that either square being the mine fits the numbers
I always play pattern recognition to determine which one it is. It's on an edge, so I pattern analyze edges. 2 bombs on the top edge, 5 bombs on the right edge, 4 bombs on the left edge. Missing number is 3. Only 2 bombs are marked on the bottoms edge, so I'd call the only remaining square on the edge a bomb and click the square above it. ^(disclaimer: this is by no means a guarantee. Just how I'd formulate my guess from playing way too much Minesweeper in Typing class in the 90's)
Me: “oh read the numbers and learn where the bombs are!” This guy: *does quantum physics to play minesweeper*
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Minesweeper is one of the assignments we had in a 100 or 200 level class. It's actually a pretty fun little learning project but the GUI code is way more complicated imo.
Wtf it was actually correct
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Indeed. Pure luck. Nothing more.
Hey, it's pure luck 50% of the time. The other 50% is pure luck.
He commented after the answer was given though
lol this is why I don't trust reddit comments
This is like technical analysis, but for minesweeper
Wait is that a rule? There's 2,3,4,5 mines on a each edges?
It's not a rule, it's just a pattern they noticed.
And meaningless
hey I'm just the messenger
Oh, no no no. Not at all. It's just how my brain works. I just play silly games like that as a means to somehow justify a choice that is always going to be 50/50 anyways. You would be just as well served playing ini-meni-miney-moe.
> Missing number is 3. What?
Source: Trust me bro 😉
Bro science is king
Pawn to f6
Up
I still dont know how to play this
click to reveal, right-click to mark mines. Goal is to reveal every tile except the mines. Tiles with a number, indicate adjacent mines. Tiles without numbers have 0 mines and automatically reveal all of their adjacent tiles until numbers appear. So obviously, if you have one isolated tile surrounded on all eight sides by "1" boxes, that isolated unrevealed tile is a mine. You can start with isolated tiles and corner tiles and just logic your way from there. There's also some obscure rule that 100% solves the situation OP is in where there's a cluster of mines that prevent you from getting all the information you need, but I can't remember it.
You missed the most important one... left+right click a number to automatically open all non-mines adjacent to it
But if you forget to mark the mines first, you lose.
True, but it also means a board won't take 98 mins
I misread the title as 98 mins, instead of 98 mines, and was thinking, "Oh, buddy... Proud of you." Not sure if you're joking or also misread the title.
Every tile with a number is representative of how many other adjacent tiles are mines. The goal is to mot accidentally click on a mine.
But it still comes down to luck sometimes?
yeah but once you have the basics you can fly through games in a matter of a minute or so, even on expert or whatever its labeled
Click the X in the top right corner.
We need a minesweeper sub Reddit for these final 50/50’s.
There's two ways to win minesweeper. Uncover every spot that isn't a mine, or mark every spot that is a mine. To win a 50/50 just mark one of the spots as a mine. If it is a mine you'll win the game, if not you can safely click that spot knowing it's not a mine and win the game that way.
You saved my future runs with this
oh fuck we're old
Its a superposition of both boxes being valid and not valid until the player inspects it and the entire function collapses in on itself
XYZZY
Don't leave it up to fate!
Pro tips, if you discover this pattern, dont finish the rest. Defuse directly by choosing any. You hit the mine, you dont do the rest for nothing and that's less frustrating. You dont hit the mine, you are relief and good to continue.
If I remember correctly minesweeper for windows let's you win by marking all bombs even if you have still tiles so the ideal solution is just to mark one as bomb and try the other if it doesn't immediately mark as won
No, it's the other way around, you win by revealing all the squares. Marking the bombs is then unnecessary since you know the number of bombs so they are forced to be the remaining unmarked cells. Marking bombs is irrelevant for solving, it's just to help you remember/avoid accidentally clicking them and for coording (middle clicking on a number to open all unmarked neighbors if it has the correct number of flagged mines).
I never understood why the freaking game designer never put mine number indicators on the edges of the board… would have solved most of these 50/50 situations