Schrodingers Bomb

Say what you will about people who play Minesweeper but it's a fucking rush when you end up in a situation like this.

You have no choice but to take a deep breath and just pick one.

There's no real consequences to losing but it sure as hell feels like it's life and death.

112

Minesweeper is a good game. I don't like it personally, but I understand why it's fun!

21
There's an iOS app called Mineswifter which only presents solvable games and never allows you to play a board with an ambiguous situation like this. I've played the daily challenge on it for years, it's great.

17
Red wire or blue wire? This ain't the movies! It will not magically work out in the end.

13
Whenever I got to this situation I get it over immediately ... no sense in completing the rest of the board if I only get to have a 50/50 chance on one play.

The biggest rush is in successfully completing two or more of these situations in one board.

5
- I wait until the very end because even if I lose I still feel like I did my best
  
  3
Wait, what do they say about people who play minesweeper?

5
- Same thing they say about people who grow oonions 😉
  
  4
- That we're massive nerds?
  
  3
Yeah, but screw the corner spots. I always click all four corners and like three other random spots before I get into a game.

2

Ah my old friend the 50/50/90. Where I get this 50/50 choice wrong 90% of the time...

60

If it makes you feel any better, it doesn't matter which one you pick, it'll be wrong either way.

57

Sometimes, it do be like that

Some of the better minesweeper clients have a "Prevent guessing" mode. Otherwise you can accept the 50-50

39

Could you provide me with one of them? I love minesweeper. Would play it religiously, but my frustration at having to play the guessing game. It only made it worse that my win to lose ratio was not based on my own failures but on chance. Also doesn't matter what it's for Windows, Linux, or Android.

6
- My go to: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/mines.html
  
  6
- My fave, since I play on Android, is Antimine (you can find it in f-droid)
  
  Has a mode where each win, increases the mines by 1, for that sweet sweet sense of pointless progression
  
  4
- minesweeper.online
  
  1

If you like minesweeper but hate these random picks, I really recommend the Hexcells series. They're fun puzzle games that can be solved purely with logic. Kind of a cross between minesweeper and sudoku.

33

Or you can just turn the "no guess" mode on like a regular human.

14
- Also this isn't a 50/50 chance to lose. You can win by placing all the flags without clearing all safe squares. So you're guaranteed to win here by just flagging one, then the other if the first didn't do the trick.
  
  11
- I don't think the existence of no guess mode (something that I don't think existed the last time I played stock minesweeper) would prevent people from wanting to try a fun game in a similar vein.
  
  7
I'll also give a good recommendation to Simon Tanthem's [Puzzles](Simon Tatham's Puzzles (40 single-player logic games) https://f-droid.org/packages/name.boyle.chris.sgtpuzzles/). Dozens of different types of puzzles!

1

When you ask her what's the matter and she says "Take a fucking guess!"

Do not, my brothers, take a guess.

27

Hahaha, sexist jokes never get old

1
- There's literally nothing sexist about that comment.
  
  1

I know everybody needs to know this so minesweeper.online has No Guessing Mode... and also a lot more than that!

19

Hexcells Infinite is also supposed to be fair play, but Hard Mode is hard so I haven't confirmed that.

2
- Haven't played Hexcells in forever... But those games (and all the other ones from the same developer) are in fact guessing free, which is the absolute bane of all fans of Minesweeper.
  
  1

Extreme dork doing an ackshually alert

This is not a case of "Schrödingers cat" because which field is the bomb and which is empty is already determined. The information is present in the memory of the program prior to the observation. Schrödingers cat is a paradox about a quantum superposition where two states exist simultaneously but are collapsed into a definite one by the act of observation. The cats fate is tied to the states of this quantum and therefore prior to observation the cat is both alive and dead, since both states exist simultaneously. It is only after observation that the definite state is determined.

16

No, you are wrong. The bomb is always where you click. Source: playing the game.

33
The game could be programmed in such a way that the state isn't determined ahead of time.

Or you, the player, the computer and the game state could all be in the infinitely branching, never collapsing wave function of the many-world hypothesis where every outcome exists.

8
I'm scared to ask what I spoiled when I read that.

7
- The joke
  
  9
But the state of the cat is also already determined in a real experiment because it is linked to the outside through air and the walls of the box via vibrations and temperature. Probably even through photons coming off the cat hitting the box. I don’t know if there’s any way to fully disentangle it from the experimenter. This theoretical cat superposition only exists as a thought experiment

6
- Right, it's meant to extrapolate the idea of two states existing simultaneously from the very abstract mathematical formulas used to express it into something more comprehensible to show the absurdity of the idea.
  
  3
Shut up, the joke is that you have no way to know which is which (and from my experience, the one with the mine is whichever one you choose, kinda like dropping bread with butter and the butter is always the side that hits the ground)

2
You're wrong. Quantum isn't how the world is, but how the mathematical model is. The superposition is "we don't know yet because we haven't looked". The truth is present in reality just like minesweeper's information is present in memory.

1
schrodingers comment: if I don't read it, did you make it?

we need to make more memes mocking the abuse of this concept

1

Minesweeper has the power to make you so angry that you get up from the computer, walk into the living room, and start reading a book to take you mind off things.

13

Is schrodinger's bomb a good joke here? The bomb is not simultaneously on both squares until measured, it is only on one. It doesn't change or err "spin"

8

That's the joke. It's a 50/50 choice, yet somehow (it feels like) you get it wrong 100% of the time. So the mine is in superposition being both present and not present under a tile. When you click the tile, you collapse the wave from and the mine appears in the tile you clicked.

25
Unless you assume it's an evil version of the game

8

I wish I understood Minesweeper better. If anyone feels inclined to explain this situation with how the rules work, id greatly appreciate it.

7

The goal of the game is to click on all of the squares without a bomb, without clicking on any square with a bomb. Each number represents exactly how many bombs are touching that square, including diagonally. When you logically narrow down which square has a bomb in it (E.g. because there is only one unclicked square touching a square with a 1), you put a flag on it, representing that there's a bomb underneath it. In this image, there is a square with a number 4. This square is touching three flagged squares, representing three bombs, and two squares that may or may not have a bomb. We know that there must be one more bomb touching the 4, but it's impossible to narrow down which square has the bomb. So you have to click on one of the squares, and there's a 50/50 chance that either you guess right, or you step on a bomb and lose the game. It's a fairly common scenario in an expert level game.

18
- Oh those pretty simple rules thanks!
  
  3
I got you.

Each number corresponds to the amount of adjacent bombs. The game randomly assigns bombs on a grid and it's the players who need to uncover everything except for the bombs. In this situation you can logic your way to knowing the three flagged squares are bombs. The square marked 4 has one more bomb next to it but there isn't enough information to know which of the remaining squares is the bomb. There are no extra lives in minesweeper. This 50/50 chance could lose the game

4
- That makes a lotore sense, thanks!
  
  2