minesweeper @lemmy.world NeatNit @discuss.tchncs.de 9mo ago

This is supposed to be solvable, but I can't find anything. Any ideas?

Screenshot from Antimine on Android. It's supposed to not require any guesses, but I'm totally stuck. I'm probably missing something simple, so more eyes on it should help... Anyone?

26 comments

Sometimes what happens with these games is that there are two possibilities, and if you were to go all the way down one solution you'd find that it required more or less bombs than the other, and you know the total number of bombs that exist in the puzzle so you can then know which solution was right. This isn't practically doable by a human, because you don't have all the information that's covered up.

I'd recommend picking a random square in the middle of that mass of covered squares. If you lose, that sucks and you might say that puzzle was unsolvable, but say hypothetically that you lost on the first click. Was that puzzle solvable? Idk.

This gave me a small existential crisis
I does look unsolvable. Is there a seed in this app were we can test it?
- I think this is antimine. I'm not able to find a seed or anything in the app so far
10 from the bottom, 8 to the right, is probably not a mine. Idk about not requiring to guess 100% but that’s the best educated guess I got. Let us know how it pans out
I also use the same app and sometimes find myself in a similar situation, having 50/50s as the only option. I think your only option is guessing, unless I'm also missing something here
- You can do a bit better than 50/50 by guessing around places that only have 1 mine but 5 options.
  
  True, that would raise the % of guessing correctly
- Can you also flag the possible mines, see the number of remaining mines then assess the chance of clicking in the deep unknown?
I ended up making a guess after feeling like it's not possible. This is the result, in case anyone wants to check their work:
Oh shit there's a minesweeper sub/community?? Fuckin yea! I just got into this game (again/more seriously) and I've been having a blast. lol

I'd also start guessing at some of the corners to try and get something to continue the round
- Are red Xs safe?
  
  How did you come to this?
  
  Also, I just posted the final result (had to make one guess), some of your marks are wrong
  
  X's are mines. Just for an example, at the top I missed a mine. There's a 1,3,3. The second 3 has a mine above and below it. If the 1 says there is a mine near it and the second 3 says there's one other mine and the only space they overlap is under the first 3, then the mine is under the first 3.
Did you ever find a solution? I'm not seeing anything too obvious.
- I ended up guessing after no one found anything, and later used an online solver (https://mrgris.com/projects/minesweepr/) to prove that there was in fact no safe square. BTW this solver is pretty cool (and different from the one I linked in the other thread), it's more of a thing to play with and learn from than a tool. The links to use it (live demo / board solver) are on the right side of the website. Check it out, even if just for a fiddle!
  
  Edit: I did have to input the whole thing manually, by which I mean just a cropped part that includes the unknown territory.
- Oh, and I think the game bugged out. It does sometimes fail to generate a valid solvable board but I don't think it happened that time because it would show a toast message and I don't think I missed it. It didn't show up in the toast history either.
  
  Shortly after this encounter I figured out that the generator has quirks for large boards, making a pattern. If you look at the fully solved board (embedded elsewhere in this comments section) you'll notice that the outer edge of the board is always safe, and the left side of the screenshot has two full columns of safe squares. This turns out to be a repeating pattern (not of the mines, just the safe columns). The end result is that it's no longer fun to play, so I turned off solvable boards and I'm now playing without. That's how I got to today's post.
  
  I think the generator incorrectly expected me to have the left edge. Or something weird like that. I played this game a lot and this was the only time I encountered something unsolvable when it should have been solvable.
Last update: I wanted to be sure, because I thought I would have noticed if the solvable generation failed. I put it into a solver, and it has confirmed that there's no safe squares to click. So yeah, 100% confirmed the level generator failed. It has happened to me a couple of times before but at the start of the game there's a very big delay as it tries to generate, and when it fails it pops a message alerting you that it might require guessing. I don't know how I could have missed that, but I must have.

This is the solver I used.
I don't know, but to me I'd go top left from the "1" that is 11 from the bottom, 5 from the left. You have a 1/6 chance of hitting a bomb, and it seems the most likely to open up more space.
The square I marked X is NOT a bomb.
- How do you figure? I don't see anything stopping it from being a bomb.
- honest question: why the uppercase not?

26 comments