Kirby703

local clown

  • she/her

speedrunner, tetris player, programmery human, absolute nerd

there is tetris on my youtube and twitch but I continue to not port content between them


this absolute monstrosity is 100k "difficulty" (which sorta measures expected time to complete one board) and I've been attempting it off and on for over a year now. there are a couple hundred people with clears of this (it probably only takes somewhere in the tens of hours for an experienced player) but this clear is mine!

even with perfect logic, I still had to guess about a dozen times and 7 of them were outright 50/50's. some consider this a flaw, but minesweeper with no guesses presents no challenge! there's a whole new game in picking the optimal guess from many possible options, and high difficulty boards take that game to an extreme.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Kirby703's post:

I've been trying to figure that out myself! I'm pretty sure they rate the "difficulty" of a board by letting the current best AI play the board many times, but I'm not sure what they do from there.

The solver outputs both a win percentage and "3bv/win" (3bv for a board is the minimum number of clicks to clear it, without using flags. so, every opening and number that doesn't border an opening is a 3bv) but I'm not sure how to get from there to difficulty. Maybe the latter value is just used exactly!

It's a little exploitable (people don't maintain the same speed as measured by 3bv/second, for one, but more importantly you can take "fail fast" approaches or pick boards that you're more likely to beat the solver at) but roughly translates to expected time to clear a board. They also just tweaked all the calculations so some values have been shaken up a little, making small high density boards a bit more difficult and large medium density boards a bit less. For instance, it changed this one from 108k to 105k.

I'm also sure there's a scene outside minesweeper.online based around downloadable clients, but I can't... find it? There's no active forums anymore, so maybe I've found the tetr.io of minesweeper and that's got the bulk of the players unless you can scrounge up a discord invite link somewhere.

I see! and I assume you're not allowed to like. use the undo* button if you guess incorrectly? is it about completing it fully "honestly"? (which, follow-up question(s) if that's a yes, what do you do when you make a mistake? are you allowed to retry the board or do you have to open a new one? is the difficulty tied to the board or to size and mine amount?) I just attempted one on both sites (33x33, 307 mines) and allowed myself to pedal back on incorrect 50/50 guesses, and finished them both within about maybe 30-45 minutes, total, so I'm assuming there's more to it.. (<- so sorry if this comes across as bragging I have no idea what the polite etiquette is here D:)

*or save the game state, depending on the online client - I usually use minesweeperonline.com because it has a nice interface (dark mode!), I didn't even know about the site you mentioned </3. looks cool though! my site doesn't really have... features beyond the core game & a custom input so it was really interesting to see so many ways to play it! :-)

hmm, yeah, the challenge is about completing it without ever clicking a mine. you'd have to start another board with the same dimensions and mines arranged in a new random way. the AI for difficulty does so many attempts at one board because it's re-randomized each time.

P.S. love the dark mode! would prefer if minesweeper.online had it available for free, since it's also got the gamification and mobile support