Shrey Tripathi

Computer plays minesweeper!

About Minesweeper:

Minesweeper is a puzzle game that consists of a grid of cells, where some of the cells contain hidden “mines.” Clicking on a cell that contains a mine detonates the mine, and causes the user to lose the game. Clicking on a “safe” cell (i.e., a cell that does not contain a mine) reveals a number that indicates how many neighboring cells – where a neighbor is a cell that is one square to the left, right, up, down, or diagonal from the given cell – contain a mine.

The project

This is a pygame project, where a minesweeper game board is represented by an 8x8 game board, and each cell is represented as a tuple (i, j).

The overall game has been represented using first-order logic, where each sentence is of the form:

{A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H} = 1

This representation has two parts: a set of cells on the board that are involved in the sentence, and a number count, representing the count of how many of those cells are mines. The above logical sentence says that out of cells A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H, exactly 1 of them is a mine.

Using this representation, we can form statements of the form {X, Y, Z} = 0 to mean that out of cells X, Y, and Z, exactly 0 of them are mines. And, all the cells in the set {X, Y, Z} are safe. Similarly, {A, B, C} = 3 means that all of A, B, C are mines.

Also, consider two sentences {A, B, C} = 1 and {A, B, C, D, E} = 2. We could then infer a new piece of knowledge, that {D, E} = 1. After all, if two of A, B, C, D, and E are mines, and only one of A, B, and C are mines, then it stands to reason that exactly one of D and E must be the other mine.

More generally, any time we have two sentences set1 = count1 and set2 = count2 where set1 is a subset of set2, then we can construct the new sentence set2 - set1 = count2 - count1

Implementation:

GitHub Repository