simon-git: puzzles (main): Simon Tatham

[Commits to Tartarus hosted VCS]

TL;DR:
  520b587 Mines: put a warning on the web page about bug reports.

Repository:     https://git.tartarus.org/simon/puzzles.git
On the web:     https://git.tartarus.org/?p=simon/puzzles.git
Branch updated: main
Committer:      Simon Tatham <anakin at pobox.com>
Date:           2025-05-18 23:08:51

commit 520b5871aed32c8b751183311b9131c046eab2c7
web diff https://git.tartarus.org/?p=simon/puzzles.git;a=commitdiff;h=520b5871aed32c8b751183311b9131c046eab2c7;hp=48a6f169c8fc48e11090a6e86e1f676fb455fd44
Author: Simon Tatham <anakin at pobox.com>
Date:   Sun May 18 22:55:36 2025 +0100

    Mines: put a warning on the web page about bug reports.
    
    Mines is the puzzle that has attracted by far the largest number of
    bug reports, including a great many claims that the "no guessing"
    feature wasn't living up to its claims. But a bug has never actually
    been found in the grid generation code. (The usual number of other
    kinds of bug, just not _that_ bug.)
    
    I've wondered for a while about putting some prominent text on the web
    version of the puzzle stressing just how many of that kind of bug
    report I've received and that all of them have been wrong, just to
    encourage people to _try_ thinking again. So I went through my email
    records and counted them. I make it 59 as of today, which is a slight
    surprise, because it _felt_ more like 100-200 to me. Still, "over 50"
    is a reasonable thing to write in the
    
    It's an interesting question _why_ Mines gets all these false-positive
    reports. One obvious possibility is simply that it's more popular than
    the rest of the games in this collection. But a more interesting idea
    is that perhaps players of ordinary Minesweeper, striving to get a
    fast clearance time, are accustomed to not spending a lot of time
    thinking about problems - instead, either open something quickly or
    guess quickly, because if you guess you _might_ not get a good
    time (kaboom!), but if you ponder for 30 seconds you _definitely_
    won't get a good time.

 html/mines.html | 7 +++++++
 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+)