When I'm going for a high score, I want the fastest time (and lost games don't count for anything). So I guess a lot, especially in the first few seconds, looking for good spreads and free information.
When I'm in the mood for a logic puzzle, I go for the best completion rate (percentage of games won). Then I click a single corner and work with whatever I get, guessing again only if my remaining options are guesses anyway. (The corner eliminates at least one bad endgame).
When I just want a fun experience, I go for most games completed in a session. In that case, I click all four corners to start to eliminate bad endgames. Those aren't a fun experience.
I started out as a flagging user (the usual right-click to mark known mines), and then I always started in the lower right corner. Then (after a few years break) I started playing non-flagging (that is no right click allowed) and I find that a middle click is much more likely to give an "easy" opening.
My usual opening consists of several middle clicks spread out until I get an opening (or failure).
For every serious minesweeper I recommend the Minesweeper Clone: http://www.minesweeper.info/downloads/MinesweeperClone.html
(On one sad night I got 79 seconds on expert..)
Added: The cost (in seconds) of clicking corners until an opening is too high compared to the risk of getting a coin toss in a corner. Prudence isn't fast enough :)
As a side note, Minesweeper the first game I ever programmed was for my intro C class in college using SRGP[1] as the graphics library. Thinking back, it was a tough project. The Minesweeper logic wasn't so bad but doing the graphics was the most work. In hindsight, it shouldn't have taken more than a couple hours to code but took everyone a fair amount of time. Of course we didn't know what they hell we were doing. Fun stuff.
EDIT: After searching around it appears there is code to prevent the first-click bomb in a rather novel way[2].
[1] http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~tik86120/X_srgp.html [2] http://www.sanchitkarve.com/blog/2009/01/does-minesweeper-ch...
With a couple new blocks, though -- a new game control, the mine blocks themselves -- it would be a moderately easy mod. Putting dynamic textures on the blocks to display numbers wouldn't be (in principle) any harder than some of the grass mods, and there's an onDestroy hook for the block you could use to clear space.
I wonder how hard 3D minecraft would be.
[Edit: Ha! It's been done! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV6n0UWJM2Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW71giahaLM
This is why we google things before building them.]
[Edit edit: Oh, nuts. Those are both still 2D. This is why we review google results before deciding not to build something.]
Er, wow. Hard.
you can build a monitor and computer in minecraft, you could specialize them to play minesweeper. I think you'd run into 300 block range problems (the world isn't simulated far away, you simply don't have enough room to wire up the redstone)
Alternatively, mods can screw around with block ids. you could provide number textures for blocks and a few special blocks. All that's left is to swap block types as the user interacts with the blocks.
I'm pretty sure a probability can be worked out for rate of occurrence and length of a wire - but with the corner strategy, you're minimizing the likely amount of perimeter by 3/4. That's got to make a "coin flip" situation more likely, which has to be weighed against the more likely reveal.
If you don't get a reveal on the first click, you end up just clicking again a few times and restarting if you reveal a mine. Doesn't waste more than a second in any case. Not sure if that's really meaningful unless there's a no restart rule, or you're being graded by the percentage of games finished that are started.
Paper on minesweeper configurations being NP-complete. Wires in the paper are wires when approached from all directions, but I'm abusing the term a bit when I also include entangled squares around the perimeter of a minesweeper opening - which have only been approached from one direction.
I think of minesweeper as a bunch of soap bubbles that are popped until you reach wires, which if they connect board boundary to board boundary, or connect to another wire that does that, or connect to themselves, end the skill game and create a probability game. Been meaning to play around with 2D areas that are surrounded by wire rings, but too lazy.
The idea of randomness carved by rules creating stable shapes intrigues me. I play minesweeper too much. Expert: 78, 95 non-flagging, lawl.
To make it more fair, calculate the probability that 3+ adjacent squares would be safe, since that's how many you get in the corner. Then the math shows that center is better because there are more neighboring squares that could be potentially blank.
More useful would be the probability of having a cascade continue on past adjacent squares to squares adjacent to those, with the "winner" being whichever location is most likely to make the largest exposed bubble.
My strategy is generally click a few places in the center quickly. If I die, I don't have much invested and just start over. If I find a large bubble, then I can play.
..and from my experience, three clicks is about optimum for speed and opening the board. All my sub 80s games have opened 'gashes' across the board, the three clicks gives you the best chance of jumping the 'wire' (as the other guy put it)..
If you are going to have to play the odds at some point anyway, may as well do it at the start before you invest 50s of your life in some pointless activity.
Benford's Law http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/march52012/index.html
Hangman http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/april12012/index.html
Yahtzee http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/january42012/index.html
Risk http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/november22011/index.html
Plus others ...
- high probability of triggering a cascade
- high probability of that cascade being "useful", that is, of being able to work outward from the cascade you opened. (Clicking on the empty corner and getting 1-3-1 on its borders means you still have to guess to escape the corner.)
- high probability of not leaving difficult areas for the end. (Coin flips are most likely to occur in corners and edges; in the middle of the board, you usually have information from multiple directions. It's still possible to be forced to guess in the middle, but it happens far less often.)
As a result, the strategy I've chosen on expert boards (based on experience, without particularly robust statistical backing) is to click the corners sequentially until I get one that allows me to open up more than a few squares. I occasionally lose a game on the second or third click this way, but I don't lose very many on late coin flips.
shameless plug: a minesweeper solver I wrote [http://mrgris.com/projects/minesweepr/demo/player/]
