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Clay Mathematics Institute: Ian Stewart on Minesweeper (claymath.org)
45 points by unwantedLetters on Aug 11, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments



As a side note, if you enjoy playing Minesweeper but don't like losing to a bad guess, you might want to try the implementation in Simon Tatham's puzzle collection:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

Unlike most other implementations, it only generates boards that can be solved by logic, so you never need to guess; your first square is guaranteed to be safe and to reveal enough information to progress.

(IIRC, the algorithm used to pre-solve each generated level bottoms out in an exhaustive search, so I guess this game variant is still in NP.)


Maybe I should read more, but this is the clearest explanation of P vs NP I've read so far.


Interesting. Do you think it's clearer than the one I gave here?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1587884


Ditto. Tying something quite abstract as SAT to a game that a 5-year old can understand is a great way to teach it.


I will be interviewing Ian soon for Math-Blog.com. If you have any specific questions you think I should ask him, please feel free to let me know.


I've submitted an interview with Ian Stewart here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1594526

He's a serious mathematician, and a serious writer of both fiction and non-fiction.


Figure 3 is incomplete; as the space depicted in it is not a valid board configuration. If either x or x' is false, then the respective 1s on the extreme sides will be invalid. This is either a crop of a real situation (in which we assume the wire repeats beyond the scope of the image), or an error.


It is a crop of a board containing a wire that extends beyond the area shown. It is not an error, although indicating (somehow - people's intuitions vary) that it's a crop would help.




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