Turning this into pure reasoning over educated guesses is a nice twist on Minesweeper gameplay. What I want now from it is a way to be able to easily work out the logic "on paper".
So one thing I do is work everything out "as if" I placed a flag or or cleared a spot. I want to be able to put a ghost flag down so that I don't have to remember what the current state of the particular path I'm trying to rule out is.
Otherwise I forget about it the second I look away or it gets complicated.
I can't play sudoku without the ability to put in shadow options, or better yet, have the game do it for me. One can argue that the keeping track in your head is a worthwhile aspect of the game, I think it's not.
Shadow options are the only way I can play Sudoku as well; this is also potentially why I don't enjoy playing Sudoku. It always feels like the only way to make progress is by making a number of informal suppositions and waiting for a contradiction to reveal itself. This is surely true of a large class of games, but the only type of constraint you have in Sudoku is "no direct collisions" (i.e. two instances of the same number can't appear in the same row, column or subregion). Since all of these constraints are essentially of the same class, I can't keep any more than one or two of them in my head at a time, hence "shadowing". When I compare this to a game like KenKen, where there are a number of different classes of constraint (i.e. all of Sudoku's, as well as the mathematical constraints introduced by KenKen's rules), I find that I can hold a larger number of those constraints in my head at once, even when they have non-local effects.
I only know a couple strategies for Minesweeper, so it was pretty cool to see this writeup make distinctions between local and global approaches, not to mention calling out explicit situations where guessing is necessary.
Comments
Turning this into pure reasoning over educated guesses is a nice twist on Minesweeper gameplay. What I want now from it is a way to be able to easily work out the logic "on paper".
So one thing I do is work everything out "as if" I placed a flag or or cleared a spot. I want to be able to put a ghost flag down so that I don't have to remember what the current state of the particular path I'm trying to rule out is.
Otherwise I forget about it the second I look away or it gets complicated.
I can't play sudoku without the ability to put in shadow options, or better yet, have the game do it for me. One can argue that the keeping track in your head is a worthwhile aspect of the game, I think it's not.
Shadow options are the only way I can play Sudoku as well; this is also potentially why I don't enjoy playing Sudoku. It always feels like the only way to make progress is by making a number of informal suppositions and waiting for a contradiction to reveal itself. This is surely true of a large class of games, but the only type of constraint you have in Sudoku is "no direct collisions" (i.e. two instances of the same number can't appear in the same row, column or subregion). Since all of these constraints are essentially of the same class, I can't keep any more than one or two of them in my head at a time, hence "shadowing". When I compare this to a game like KenKen, where there are a number of different classes of constraint (i.e. all of Sudoku's, as well as the mathematical constraints introduced by KenKen's rules), I find that I can hold a larger number of those constraints in my head at once, even when they have non-local effects.
I only know a couple strategies for Minesweeper, so it was pretty cool to see this writeup make distinctions between local and global approaches, not to mention calling out explicit situations where guessing is necessary.
"It always feels like the only way to make progress is by making a number of informal suppositions and waiting for a contradiction to reveal itself."
Sounds a bit like the scientific method =) Make hypotheses and try to falsify them