I’ve gotten over it now. No really, I’m okay.
But for a while I was, well, bored and I played minesweeper way too much.
My best times are as follows:
Beginner: 9 seconds
Intermediate: 43 seconds
Advanced: 126 seconds
How about you?
(I did manage to get a life since then, BTW)
beginer 3secs
med 37secs
never liked to play advanced. It didn’t play fair on that level.
Beginner: 6 sec
Intermediate: 37 sec
Expert: 114 sec
I quit playing Minesweeper because it kept making me guess. No matter how good your powers of deduction are, the danged thing will come down to “eenie meenie miney moe” at the end! ARGH! :mad:
Yes.Thats because its NP-complete! Ian Stewart gave a wonderful lecture at the Clay Institute sometime ago on this.
[sidebar] NP-complete? logic term? inquiring minds want to know [/sidebar]
http://www.claymath.org/prizeproblems/milliondollarminesweeper.htm
I am not even going to try explaining NP-complete here.I never do it well.
The above links should help.
It ain’t easy to understand, but basically, it’s one of the hardest problems whose solutions can be verified in a reasonable time (i.e., if someone tells you where the mines are, you can determine whether they’re a liar or not pretty quickly). Read the links if you want more.
Beginner: 2 seconds.
Intermediate: 23 seconds.
Advanced: 84 seconds.
I had a lot of time first year.
oh, sure, Googler, tease me like that, then fob me off with links.
I’ll talk to my-brother-the-logic-prof about it.
Check out this thread. If you have a question, post there and I’ll try to answer it.
Another very nice example (and damn useful one which is applied in cryptography or even in Monty Hall problem)is the factorization of prime numbers.Suppose I multiply 2 really big(say 200 digits) prime numbers a and b and find their product c. I tell you the value of c and I ask you to factorize c.i,e. tell you to find the value of a and b. It is not easy for you to do that.(though it might look easy) But on the other hand if I also tell you the value of a and b, you can easily check whether they are the factors.
This is the basis of P=NP? theory. It makes the unusual claim that ,“if it is easy to check for a solution to a problem ,then it is easy to solve it!”
I’ve seen these claims of times that are unbelievable to me, so I’m not doubting them so much as trying to figure how they are possible. Claims above of 2 or 3 seconds, I cannot make five or six wild clicks in that time. Do you play that way and just wait until it happens to win the game? My fastest time ever on the “expert” has been 216. Now I don’t ever expect to set the world record, national record, state record, but when I see people claiming 85 (here) and sixty some on a minesweeper site I just do not understand. Like babydrln says a lot of it is deduction but it boils down to making a guess. In order to get fast times is it all a guess?
No, it’s not all guessing. You have to be able to reason pretty quickly. On the other hand, there is quite a bit of luck involved in getting a time that involves finding significantly more than one mine per second.
Googler, I take back my comment about “fobbing me off with links.”
I looked at them.
I looked at ultrafilter’s link.
I read the comments which followed on this thread.
My head hurts.
Thanks for trying.
The Rule against Perpetuties now seems a model of clarity and simplicity.
NP-completeness is definitely not a simple concept. I don’t know anyone (myself included) who really understood it the first time around. So don’t feel at all bad for getting a headache.