Goo dragon/Shapeshifter thing. Tinkerer and maker. He/Him.
Drgn NOT Derg!
Occasionally suggestive Content, 18+
| The Museum - EMCOA | https://emcoa.co.uk/ |
| Kofi | https://ko-fi.com/jencen |
| LinkTree | https://linktr.ee/jencen |
Aircon in 4 "easy" steps.
Step 1. Build wall and make sure nothing will foul
Step 2. Install plasterboard
Step 3. Mark and cut holes
Step 4. Hoist the heavy bastard up onto the wall
Fucking blessed cool air!!!!!
eurgh. think the neighbours have been outside in the garden all day chain smoking. and now the wind has picked it all up and blown it into our house o.<
Gods it'll be nice to get the fuck out of this place.
Gonna fucking stab something in a minute >.<
Actually trying to eat something.
Make chicken gyoza - 90% coriander by volume. Fucking disgusting
Grab couple of breakfast bars. One of them is wide open. Not gonna touch it
FFS O.<
Cider supper it is then >.<
Also. Struggling again today.
Slept like shit. Back is killing me.
Am only here because there are due to be deliveries. One down. One more big fucker that's due "between 8AM and 8PM" /HELPFUL/
My room AC between 2 and 3 some smaller bits between 3 and 4 o.<
I think I have lucked in with this GP practice.
There's an online form for triage. So you don't have to get up buttfuck early and mash the phone at 7:59 precisely to get through for an appointment.
If is serious, they'll get you in. (Was in that afternoon for my hernia)
In the case Monday. I messaged in that I was having mental health issues due to mum's passing. Within a minute or so I had a text back.... Not an automated one BTW! Saying "sorry for your loss. We'll get an appointment sorted, if there's an urgent mental health issue here's the number"
Then a second one with a number for grief counselling.
Appointment with mental health practitioner was Thursday. Which is better than the 2-3 weeks I'd have been given at my old GP. And after. Got another personalised text from them.
Today got a call re: sick note. Doc declined it as they don't do them before self cert runs out.
But practice have just resubmitted it with the right dates.
Last place wouldn't have even called me o.o
Got to unit early. Because I woke up at half fucking 6 and couldn't settle again.
Is already too moist and warm o.<
Now to play the waiting game on "delivered" approximately and palletforce.
Who have said my stuff will be coming today. With no indication of when.
DX didn't even track as an attempted delivery yesterday. Just "scanned onto van" and "scanned into collecting warehouse" o.<
At least the Aircon peeps will phone me 30 mins before
Found a delivery service worse than Evri/Herpes.
Delivered Exactly.
Or as I've started calling them "Delivered" Approximately.
As stuff either doesn't get delivered, or it's no-where near your address o.<
They tracking is fucking shite as well.
In my Portable Puzzle Collection, it was recently (a few weeks ago) the 20th birthday of the game "Mines": a reimplementation of Minesweeper which ensures every grid can be solved by reasoning rather than guesswork. The first click in a completely blank grid is guaranteed to be safe, and to open an area of more than one clue, and after that, you can always identify a safe square to open next by thinking about the currently visible clues.
This makes it possible to generate grids with a much higher density of mines than standard randomised Minesweeper, such as the example shown here with 99 mines in only a 16×16 grid. I actually didn't predict that this would be possible when I wrote the grid generator originally: I only expected to be able to play on settings like the standard Windows ones, without those nasty last-minute frustrations. The ability to turn up the density by more than a factor of 2 was a very pleasant surprise – my algorithm was far more effective than I had anticipated!
The odd thing about Mines is: in the past 20 years, this one game has received far more bug reports about insoluble game instances than any other puzzle in my collection. Very likely more than all the other games *put together*.
But not one of those reports has turned out to be a real bug in the grid generation. In cases where they sent a save file or a game ID, I generally played through the game myself to make sure; if they only sent a screenshot, I've always at least pointed out something I could see in the picture. *Everybody* who sent this kind of report turned out to have missed something.
Happy 20th birthday, Mines!
I've always wondered why Mines has attracted *so many* reports of insolubility. My other puzzle games get the occasional one (and, across the whole collection one or two have been right). But Mines gets a large majority.
Perhaps it's just that Mines is far more popular then the rest of my games, and the larger number of bug reports is in proportion to the larger number of players? I don't have statistics to confirm if that's true, though.
And I have another theory:
Players used to playing Minesweeper as a high-speed game, on a timer, simply aren't *used* to having to stop and reason carefully. Because if you're trying to beat your speed record, there's no point: if you stop and ponder over a tricky deduction for 20 seconds, you might or might not finish the game successfully, but you *certainly* won't get a high score. So you might as well treat anything above-averagely difficult *as if* it was impossible.
Speaking of speed play, the most interesting email conversation I've ever had about Mines was with a serious competitive Minesweeper player – someone who placed highly in world tournaments.
First, I hadn't known there _was_ a serious tournament Minesweeper scene, so that was interesting by itself. But also, this player had been using my Mines on the high-density settings as an element of their training programme, to get lots of practice at the situations that come up with high-numbered clues, which you don't get many chances to practise if you only play random grids.
But they didn't like my Mines's user interface, which makes sense, because it's intentionally simplified for portability. And if your reflexes are finely tuned to drive the standard UI at incredibly high speed, any tiny difference will surely throw you off your stride. So they were looking at extracting the grid generation code from my implementation, and sticking it into a modified version of one of the 'pro clones' – the versions of the game used in tournament play. That way, they'd get my high-density grids with the UI they needed.
Alas, I don't know if they ever completed that project, or if it ended up improving their play!
@simontatham
There are two solutions.
Either prevent undoing the first click.
Or reset the game using the same seed.
The latter may confuse people using undo to cheat, as the same seed will generate a different grid with a different first click.
@balki because only Minesweeper is _traditionally_ timed.
But yes, I've always thought it would be nice to make the timer optional across all games, so that you can turn it on for other games, or off for Mines (if you don't like the subconscious time pressure).
Now that there's a user-preferences system, that's reasonably feasible, but it's never got to the top of my priority list.
@RandamuMaki I'm afraid the things you've filled in on the top 4 rows are also wrong. They're consistent with the clues currently shown, but they're not the only pattern consistent with those clues. Opening further squares will reveal clues that rule out one of the two possibilities.
I expected someone might want to replay this particular game and finish it. So the alt text of my original post contains a game ID that you can paste into any version of my Mines!
@simontatham I had never thought much about the determinability of minesweeper until I did a version on a pen plotter. Then it became important and I learned a few things. Your version sounds great. I don’t like the indeterminate portions in the classic version.
@knutaf I'm afraid I've never figured out how to make the web version friendly to mobile browsers. That's not really my expertise – I'd welcome help from someone who does know the answers to things like that (in particular, in plain unassisted JS with no framework on top).
But there are app versions for mobile devices, such as @shortcipher's Android port.
@simontatham I wonder if some of this is a misunderstanding of the set of information you may be required to use to solve it. e.g I played a bit prompted by this toot, and ran into a game which had a corner like this.
Game is perfectly solvable, but only using the information that there are 170 mines on the board. You can't solve this corner with only local information, which surprised me.
(https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/mines.html#30x16:15,0,m63e3099956808ffbfa625e4c0b131198ba6da37aed14ffb3997c11081dfb2f16679f372561b93369f1db2f87bf1c442346633ed9763ca41436888873 if you're interested)
@simontatham
I have a trick when there seems to be a bug:
Open a second copy of the came, then use "specific" to start the same game, and click solve. If it solves it, you missed something. If it can't solve it, there's a bug, either in the generation (not solvable without guessing), or in the solver.
This works because in most of the games, the "specific" string contains the grid layout, not the seed use to generate it, and the second copy ensures that the solver doesn't have any data from generating the grid.
Untangle (I think that's the only one) can't solve a grid without the data from generation, but the rest of them, this is an efficient way of checking if there's a bug.
@leeloo I agree that works in most games and not Untangle, but Mines is another exception. So is Guess. In those, the game id _does_ contain the solution rather than the clues, because how else could you possibly represent a specific instance of a Minesweeper grid?
Reopening a Mines descriptive game ID in a second instance and hitting Solve will tell you where the first instance thought the mines were, but it won't re-run the _solver_ to confirm they can be deduced one by one from the starting point.
@simontatham
Guess is obvious, I guess my eyes skipped that one looking down the list.
And I guess mines works the same way, although it could maybe store hints for every square instead, but that would be huge.
@simontatham I just replaced the mines version I had been playing for the past few weeks with yours, because yours is solvable.
I'm happy to spend some time brooding over a difficult problem and don't care about speed. I did hate ending up guessing in the other version time and again. I may have overlooked clues occasionally, but certainly not as often as I ended up stuck.
@simontatham
I play Light Up several times per day and never found an unsolvable one (I admit to skip some when I'm are tired, but if I search deep anough I always find a way), I'll find it ard to believe that Mines is different
ps: Thank you, sir
@KyleBorah it's called "Portable" Puzzle Collection because it runs on many platforms – there are desktop versions for Windows, Linux and (currently unmaintained) Mac, the same code compiles to WASM and runs in a browser, and there are half a dozen ports to other platforms downstream of me that I know of. And probably at least a few I don't.
I have no real idea of how you support screen readers in application software at all. Last I heard there weren't any standard APIs for it. Also I'm not even sure what a screen reader for Mines would _say_? What kind of verbal user interface do you have in mind for a grid-based game of this kind?
But if you think it's easy, patches welcome!
The one puzzle I'd love to see added to your collection is a sliding blocks puzzle like the Sliding Blocks of Huarong. Wikipedia knows it as "Klotski".
I have a version on my Kobo Elipsa ereader, but I would love to have it for my phone and tablet as well.
@agreeable_landfall there's a Klotski implementation in the code base, in fact. It lives in the 'unfinished' subdirectory, under the name 'Slide'.
The reason it's in 'unfinished' is that the game generation is just too slow, and scales very badly with the grid size. I never figured out any way to improve it. But it's playable once a grid is generated.
I and everyone I knew who mineswept raged at those last three clicks at which you had to guess. It was a dishonest game.
Thank you for this.
Nall 
Simon Tatham
Ron Bowes
Chris Taylor
Eleanor LNR Blair
Leeloo
ShadSterling
RavenWorks
Paul Hart
Balakrishnan Balasubramanian
john fink ok!! :goat:
scmbradley
Maki
Adam
alphabetter
Benjamin T. Rancourt
knutaf
Ben Harris
David R. MacIver
abacabadabacaba
Virginicus
Joey Rees-Hill
Blue
Wilson
Vashti
42STENOngles
Nazo
Wynke
2something
goaty goats (she) 
Andrew Collier
日本語まあまあ
Freya (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩
Poloniousmonk
sirjofri
Phil McKerracher