Minesweeper Info

These articles and links provide plenty of interesting and deep information on Minesweeper. A huge number of people have played the basic game, so although it appears simple at first, there is a ton below the surface. Not all of this is by me, so I'll try to be clear who made each article or resource.

Math and Algorithms

• Minesweeper is NP-complete, which means that, in a mathematical sense, determining whether you can make progress from a minesweeper position is as hard as hundreds of other very important mathematical problems. The linked page is the author Richard Kaye's homepage, where he also has a few other related papers, including one on infinite Minesweeper being Turing-complete.
• The Minesweeper Board Museum is a few pages I made to show off important, unique, or interesting Minesweeper boards. These include boards that have the maximum or minimum known value of some mathematical property.
• This board layout tool lets you place and move mines on a board, and generates various statistics in real time. It also lets you ask the computer to try to move mines around to increase or decrease one of those statistics.
• Minesweeper Probability Calculator - takes a set of known mines and clues, and determines the probability that different squares contain a mine. This contains a very efficient algorithm that I found to determine these probabilities, which can handle configurations with far more combinations than an optimized brute force algorithm. I intend to write up a full description of what it does soon. Borthralla has a great Minesweeper tool/version written in Java, found here (save the raw Minesweeper.jar file and run it), that uses this algorithm for complicated situations.
• I have a C++ library in progress which will allow easy and fast computation of various Minesweeper statistics on random boards. I also intend to write up descriptions of what these statistics mean. The most interesting ones try to solve the board efficiently and return the number of moves it took, which is a good measure of the difficulty of a given board, and I want to code up and describe some of my improvements on these board-solving methods and on moving towards an optimal (fewest clicks) solver.

Tips and Tricks

• Notes on Minesweeper3D - pretty much everything I know about Minesweeper3D.
• Notes on Mamono Sweeper - pretty much everything I know about Mamono Sweeper.

Minesweeper History

• Minesweeper: More Than a Game - a very interesting article by Fritz (a top 10 player), on the history of the game, the community, playing techniques, and importance
• "Unincluded Features" - an article by Jonian Grazhdani, on a bug in one of the previous versions of an official clone, and a few major cheaters that abused it, along with their stories.
• The minesweeper.info articles page contains the above articles as well as a few dozen others on math, community history, Minesweeper tournaments, and so on.
• The minesweeper.info wiki has many other interesting articles. Some great historical information is contained in Board Cycles, Dreamboard, Famous Cheaters, Windows Minesweeper, and World Ranking History.