I remember when I was a kid and was trying to explain this to my uncle after he was watching me play and keep beating his time. He asked how I knew a certain spot was blank and I told him I didn’t, but that I knew there was a 75% chance it was. He told me that was cheating. I remember feeling pretty shocked that an adult would think that way, but it was a good early lesson for dealing with people in the real world.
In this case, I would start with the center-bottom coin toss. That minimizes the amount of work I have to do; 50% of the time, this entire analysis is totally moot, because I picked the mine. Furthermore, situations like that are extremely easy to analyze (are there other blanks that could impact it? This is a simple adjacency check) and very common. I suspect it’s less than 1% of boards where I get to the point that an analysis in this depth would be beneficial and there are no coin tosses left.
I remember when I was a kid and was trying to explain this to my uncle after he was watching me play and keep beating his time. He asked how I knew a certain spot was blank and I told him I didn’t, but that I knew there was a 75% chance it was. He told me that was cheating. I remember feeling pretty shocked that an adult would think that way, but it was a good early lesson for dealing with people in the real world.
Anyway, thanks for sharing, brings back memories.
In this case, I would start with the center-bottom coin toss. That minimizes the amount of work I have to do; 50% of the time, this entire analysis is totally moot, because I picked the mine. Furthermore, situations like that are extremely easy to analyze (are there other blanks that could impact it? This is a simple adjacency check) and very common. I suspect it’s less than 1% of boards where I get to the point that an analysis in this depth would be beneficial and there are no coin tosses left.