What is Minesweeper?
Minesweeper, for those of you have not come across it, is a very simple game available in some form or another on most computers. The player is presented with a grid of squares, behind each of which lies either a mine or a safe space. The aim of the game is to uncover all the safe spaces, and, at the same time, ‘flag’ all of the mines. This task is made possible by the fact that clicking on a safe square will immediately show how many mines surround that square. From this information, it is sometimes possible to work out where to step, without any guesswork being involved. On the other hand, sometimes it’s all down to plain luck… Minesweeper from an AI’s Point of View Inevitably, if unfortunately, we’re going to have to introduce a little jargon. Our AI is going to keep track of what it knows about the board using an array; that is, a grid of values. Each square on the Minesweeper board has its own cell in this array In addition, our AI is going to have to be able to ‘think’ about po
