

Clay Mathematics Institute: Ian Stewart on Minesweeper - unwantedLetters
http://www.claymath.org/Popular_Lectures/Minesweeper/

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jcl
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.)

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

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

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

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acangiano
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.

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RiderOfGiraffes
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.

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NinetyNine
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.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
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.

