Minesweeper. Need I say more?

The BBQ Pit
1

So my job is often rather boring. There are spats of frenzied activity, surrounded by mounds and mounds of lethargy-inducing down time. Sorta like being Janet Jackson’s public relations person.

Anyway, I have cast about for ways to while away my time while at the office. Bitter experience has taught me that some activities (self-love, whaling, the production of musical scores using methane) are frowned upon by the powers that be in our organization. Creativity is obviously not highly valued around here.

The SDMB does an admirable job of filling the void, but it’s rather unpredictable. Let’s face it, sometimes there just isn’t anything worthwhile to read on here. (As proof, look at the tripe you’re reading right now.) One of my co-workers, in an effort to stave off boredom, has mastered the art of thumping paper clips with only one hand. His goal at the moment is to hit the door of the CEO’s office while standing at the doorway to my office, without getting caught. This is actually a pretty fair distance; contrary to popular belief, I am not a captain of industry. I’m more like a cabinboy of industry.

In frustration, I have turned to some of the preprogrammed games on my work computer. Solitaire occupied me for a time, but couldn’t keep my interest. Pinball is okay, but isn’t exactly cerebral in nature. I find myself keeping a cigarette tucked behind my ear all the time and refusing to take off my black leather jacket (with the collar turned up, naturally) if I play it too often.

I decided to try Minesweeper. And thus the Portal to Hell opened.

Oh, the game is entertaining enough, if rather drab. The object, if you have never played it, is to discover where a set number of mines are located by clicking on a grid of blank tiles. If you click on a mine, the game is over. If you click on a non-mined tile, it will tell you how many mines surround that particular tile. You then have to use logic and deduction to determine where the mines are around that tile. Simple enough, right? I played the Beginner’s version, and the Intermediate version, and had a grand old time. So I moved up to Expert.

Big mistake.

See, the problem is, the game is very deceiving. Supposedly there are only 99 mines in the Expert version, out of 480 tiles. My ass, there are 99 mines. I’m quite sure the game moves the frickin’ mines around while I’m not looking, just to mess with me.

Plus, the Expert mode freaks with your head. It’ll put a solid block of 20 mines all together, and there’s no damn way to figure out what’s in the middle of all these gray tiles without clicking on a mine.

And it knows (oh yes, it knows) how frustrated I get when I spend five minutes working the board, quickly identifying the mines, just be-bopping along, only to hit a brick wall. I’ll run out of corners to work. I’ll be faced with a solid line of tiles, no corner in site, and all the numbers next to the tiles will say “1.” Ten “1s” all in a row. How the hell am I supposed to know where the mines are? Ain’t no logic involved in that; now I’m reduced to trusting dumb luck. And my luck is always exceptionally dumb. It’s the George Bush of luck. I always click on a mine at this point, and watch five minutes of work go down the drain. It always seems to happen when there are about 20 mines left on the board. So near the finish line, and denied once again.

The coup de grace occurs when I’m feverishly clicking the tiles, closing in on a new personal best for beating this machination of the Devil, and a co-worker will stick their head into my office to ask me a question. “Hey, Sauron, have you sent out that e-mail about the new pricing structure yet?” No, you buttmunch, I was this close to finally putting this game in its place, and you had to come and INTERRUPT my train of thought with some trivial work detail that ** COULD’VE WAITED AT LEAST ONE MORE MINUTE …**

I have taken to playing the theme song to the James Bond movie “Goldfinger” using naturally occuring methane, but instead of singing “Gold-finger,” I sing “Mine-sweeper.” Just to show the game the level of disdain with which I view it. It doesn’t really help with the frustration, but I’ve found that it will keep co-workers out of my office for upwards of ten minutes at a stretch. Sometimes longer, if I’m able to get into the second verse of the lyrics. That usually requires Mexican food for lunch, though.

Does anyone else share my strange fascination/hatred with this innocuous game? Or am I alone in spewing vitriol all over this program of Satan?

Full disclosure: I’ve been playing the game, off and on, while posting this thread. And now the damn thing is telling me that I’ve identified every single mine on the board, except one. Ninety-eight mines down, one to go. And there are three tiles remainnig under which the mine could be lurking. No amount of deduction is going to tell me where the mine lies; I’m going to have to trust to George Bush luck again. Here we go …

Shit.

2

Play Freecell, it’s much more fun and not half as frustrating. I try to see how many in a row I can get, my record is 101. Whoop, dee dee.

:cool:

3

???
1111111111111111
^
Not a mine (one of the first 2 "1"s must be. one of the first 3 "1"s must be. therefore the third one is not.)

4

Ok, so that submitted itself without giving me a chance to format it. I’ll try again

:confused: :confused: :cool:

If they’re all ones.

I was a librarian at the grad student library.

C

5

I went through a horrid period of Minesweeper addiction at my last job. (It’s not on my PC at this job, thank heavens) If you keep it up, surprisingly you’ll get pretty good even at the expert level.

And then you will be battling to get your times faster and faster. The evil never ends.

Freecell to me is equally as maddening, except there is no time component. So it’s better for goofing off at work, when you might be expected to divert your attention to something gasp work related!

6

What YOU need is Nethack. Your life will never be the same. It’s freeware.

7

I kicked the habit after I left university, thank all gods.

One thing I found, albeit rather inconsequential in the grand scheme, was that whenever you have a 2 with a 1 on each side (I1II2II1I), the 2 is always clear.

This has never failed to help me out.

So far.

8

I sometimes make myself a custom minesweeper board with a jillion squares and 10 mines. Makes me feel good to solve it in 10 seconds.

Here’s how I play Free Cell: I turn the auto feature off and try to get four lines from king down to ace (without moving the aces up). I can successfully do this about 1 out of 8 tries. Then I move the cards around so that the hearts and clubs are in one line and the diamonds and spades are in another. Finally I turn the auto feature back on and click an ace and watch my piles move up in order.

Yes, I do have a lot of time on my hands. Why do you ask?

9

So I figure, “Maybe I should task-switch back over to SDMB, see what’s happening there. After all, the carpal tunnel in my left hand (had to switch after burning out the right) is so bad I can almost see it throbbing from playing Minesweeper all day.” First thread I see is this one - hilarious. I hate the game, but cannot stop.

10

The challenge I give myself on minesweeper is to clear all the non-mine squares without actually flagging any of the mines… Once you step on the last non-mine square the game will label everything else for you and finish it off. Doubles or trebles the difficulty.

11

Dear Sauron,

I’m not trying to make trouble, but there are more than a few people here who are desperately seeking employment. One is currently Pitting his unemployment difficulties because he is seriously concerned about his family’s future.

I’m self-employed, so this issue is not really my problem. But your Pitting “Minesweeper,” a game that you play on a leisurely workday, is more than a little insensitive, especially in this job market.

Separately, during the various times I’ve had the fortune to be entrusted with employment by someone else – even under the most lax conditions – it’s never once crossed my mind that I could just “while away my time.” I guess I kind of look at that as a form of stealing.

Your tenure may vary.

B
.

12

Look at it this way:

If you could always beat Minesweeper, you could be used to crack almost every form of encryption widely used today. That would mean that your life would depend on the whims of supervillains. Do you want to be beholden to a supervillain for your very existence?

13

Since you have so much time on your hands, why don’t you try to beat Freecell game 11982? (Hint: you can’t- it’s the only Freecell game you can’t beat.)

14

I played a lot of Minesweeper all throughout college. I know all the little tricks. I mastered the beginner, intermediate and even the expert phase. It got to the point where I was creating a custom game as big as it would let me with about 190 mines. Those were difficult to solve, but eventually I could solve those too.

I really have no life.

15

Nethack, eh? I may have to check into that.

El Cid Viscoso: This may come as a shock to you, but there do exist jobs where one is required to work extremely hard a portion of the time, and then is allowed to relax another portion of the time. My boss, who is the president of our company, and his boss, our CEO, occasionally sit in my office and discuss effluvia and minutiae. Your work ethic is commendable, but trust me: Not all jobs require constant nose-to-the-grindstone effort.

To borrow a famous quote: “Man’s reach must exceed his grasp, else what’s a Heaven for?” If the Pit were only about the serious, the urgent, the life-or-death struggles we humans face, it would be a rather drab place, don’t you think?

ultrafilter: What kind of benefits go along with that whole beholden-to-a-supervillain gig? If it pays enough, and has good medical and dental, I’d be tempted.

Of course, first I’d have to beat the damn Minesweeper game on a regular basis. No supervillain worth his or her salt would alter their plans for world domination based on MY skills at the moment.

16

Sometimes when you have a big block of unknown squares with numbers around it, you can only deduce where the mines are by looking at how the numbers interact with the neighboring squares. On a local level the mine can be in a lot of different squares, but if you look at where other nearby mines can be, you will see that certain patterns are impossible. If you can determine that a square cannot contain a mine because of these patterns, you can click on the square and get additional information.

[sub]sturmhauke suddenly realizes that he has spent an embarrassing amount of time analyzing freakin’ Minesweeper, and slinks away.[/sub]

17

This page has a freeware hexagonal version of Minesweeper on it.

18

so what your best times for the three levels (rubbing hands in anticipation)

19

What’s scary is when I’ve played so many times in a recent period that I can simply look at a specific pattern of numbers and know which are mines and which are not without thinking (though I can’t quite remember how you worked through the logic anymore - though I’m sure I did), and I’m right. ((If I worked through it again, it could take an extra 30 seconds))

But then you get to those points where no logic is going to do anything. The mine is in one of those two boxes, it could be either, and you’re this close to a high score, which means - I’m going to pick wrong.

It’s just not right.

20

Oh, I knew we were headed for this! 7, 41, and 110 seconds, respectively, though on a previous computer, I had the expert level down to 104 seconds.

Theoretically, of course, it should be possible for all the mines to be packed together, contiguously, with no empty spaces interspersed, so that if you click elsewhere, you will win the game in one second. Maybe it’s programmed to avoid that coincidence, however, since I’ve never heard of anyone encountering that setup.