The house wins big in minesweeper

Useful takeaways from this story.

People all over the country are flocking over to try your casino-style minesweeper game!

As with the last puzzle, you can choose which cells are revealed and what number each revealed cell shows, but not where the mines are.

You must choose them in a way that results in at least one valid mine configuration.

Building the complete brief

The page is ready to read now. The fuller skim-friendly version will appear here automatically.

The useful part

People all over the country are flocking over to try your casino-style minesweeper game! As with the last puzzle, you can choose which cells are revealed and what number each revealed cell shows, but not where the mines are. You must choose them in a way that results in at least one valid mine configuration.

How it works

Once that's set in place, the machine will randomly generate a collection of mines that satisfy all the revealed numbers.
If 2 configurations with 4 mines and 3 configurations with 5 mines are possible, all 5 choices are equally likely.
Revealing or unrevealing a cell, or changing a number to a different number.
What should the (modified) grid be, and what's the probability of the player winning for that grid?

Details worth keeping

Your casino has been doing really well these last few weeks. You are not allowed to choose the number of mines. The perfectly fair grid and the modified grid can only differ in one cell.

Keep reading in the app

Open the app view to save this story, compare related coverage, and continue from the same source.

Open in app