In Expert mode, Minesweeper presents you with a 30x16 game field (480 slots), 99 of which contain mines. A brute force approach tells us that, (with the exception of edge slots) given that each slot can have up to 8 adjacent mines with the mean being around 3, the probability of solving an Expert game without using deductive logic approaches zero quite oh so infinitely. Let's use this knowledge to make some simple deductions: 1) by recognizing patterns in the placement of mines in relation to squares that are known to not contain mines, we can substantially increase the probability of being able to solve the Expert game 2) by presuming that our first guess always hits a slot that doesn't contain a mine (always the case in Minesweeper), we can further increase this probability. However, to translate this into a real life situation, we can't presume that - IRL this may lead to a butterfly effect (read on) or something similar 3) by avoiding guesswork, we can minimize the probability of hitting a mine 4) by minimizing guesswork, we can also minimize entropy on the game field (in the closed system) Armed with such knowledge, let's transfer this into a real life situation with a real life example: you are about leave for the airport to board a direct flight from London to NY. Your single aim is to reach the destination safely and on time - to do that, you need to make a series of decisions that would guarantee your duly arrival. Let's look at the above brute force example: if you were to leave your house symbolically blindfolded and ears filled with motor oil, then the chances of your reaching New York pretty much start to approach zero after you've been walking for two minutes. By recognizing some simple patterns, starting with things like "look to your left first, then to your right when crossing a street", you can increase this probability drastically. By eliminating guesswork, such as which route to take, before you leave (for instance, would it be quicker to take a chance and take the fictional A5 straight to the airport, or drive 2 miles along the fictional A17 and then take the safe bet - the offroad approach - with the risk of being snowed in?) you can start to make estimates. After you've taken the route to the airport to NY every Tuesday for two years, you'll be able to use rock solid empiric observation without any doubt to estimate within a couple of minutes the time it would take you to reach the destination or any of the "checkpoints" along the way. The only difference is that, this knowledge has actually been formed by recognizing more and more patterns: weather, road and traffic conditions, who the pilot is, what state the US international affairs are in, etc, and incorporating them into a customized, a very specific pattern that is precisely tailored (by yourself) to suit your needs. By shifting this "pattern of patterns" by a marginal amount you can easily offset the balance in the system in such a way that it will never be regained. This would lead to a butterfly effect, with the result being that you will not reach NY on time (or at all, in case you happen to get killed when you hurry across a busy street). While all of this may seem very natural and rational, it's weird how people disregard their ability to form such "sequential systems of patterns" - most people get up at a fixed time almost every morning, take a shower that lasts exactly n minutes, drink their coffee in m minutes and make it to the bus stop at exactly 8:27 AM. That is a pattern - in a way a predetermined pattern, unless it is offset by another pattern that interleaves this particular pattern, in which case we need to do some guesswork. The question is: why do some people always guess wrong, some people always guess correctly while most people seem to be at the tip of the Gaussian distribution (guessing correctly half of the time and wrong the other half of the time)? Humanity has coined the term luck to describe this phenomenon (apparently, according to the saying, in case you're Irish, then you have quite a bit better chances of reaching NY on time every Tuesday 40 years in a row than if you were, say, a Peruan). Or let me put it this way: why can some people finish an Expert game in Minesweeper 90% of the time they start one while some fail on a regular basis (such as myself)? Why is that? Is it that some people come with an incredibly better intuitive knack of being able to recognize vital links in potentially dynamically changing patterns while some could stare at a flock of pigeons manually switchable street light for their entire lives and die a starving death because their research went nowhere brains just couldn't grasp the "pattern"? If, so then why isn't "pattern recognition" being taught in grade school? After all, as it would seem, a gift in this would be a definitive weapon against the otherwise cruel and unsubjective world. Just a little something I thought of while playing Minesweeper...

Kinda low reader activity in this thread...

Just so you know, Minesweeper is NP complete. I don't know how this was proved or anything, but I was in the math building one day going to a session, and there was clearly a picture of mine sweeper on a whiteboard with some half erased equations and the underlined writing, "Minesweeper is NP complete".

You're all talking balderdash.