@Scmbradley true, you have to interpret "can" with a certain amount of pragmatism. I agree that there are situations in which Minesweepering is technically possible but prohibitively expensive.

In this situation I generally try extra hard to get the client to provide a reproducible example. Sometimes they still can't, or won't, but sometimes they just haven't thought of trying, so in my experience it's worth a shot.

Hmm. I would have said this describes solving a Sudoku: "finding a way to acquire another clue, and then using that to get another, and so on." You identify how to acquire one piece of information, one clue. As you add pieces of information, you can eventually solve the puzzle. You don't stare at it until you solve it...you figure out how to use the information you have to get another piece of information.

I guess I think Minesweeper & Sudoku are solved in a very similar manner?

When things don't sodoku or minesweep, I'll start at the top and start tracing values through until I see something completely wrong. But if you are debugging AI written concurrent code or event driven code or some unholy combination of distributed technologies across several computers, then 🤷🤷‍♂️🤷‍♀️ ?

The other big trick I learned that can help a lot when nothing is making sense is to ask myself what stupid thing I've done. Seriously, hunting for the stupid thing I did is usually far more productive than hunting for some obscure compiler or library or OS bug. ... just please don't be the one to remind me of this, it's no fun when people imply I do stupid things!

What computers are best at is doing slightly different things over and over very, very fast.

@simontatham

Both games reveal more given digits as you work on the problem. I get it: There's a qualitative difference between the puzzle revealing additional facts as a reward for correct deductions, and the solver filling in additional clues for themself. But that doesn't really impact the approach to solving all that much, so I don't find this metaphor particularly meaningful or revealing.

Btw., look up “fog of war Sudoku” for a fun combination of both puzzle types 😺

https://blog.plover.com/prog/katara-advice.html

“Novice programmers often imagine that they can figure out what is wrong from looking at the final output and intuiting the solution Sherlock Holmes style. This is mistaken. Nobody can do this. Debugging is an engineering discipline: You come up with a hypothesis, then test the hypothesis. Then you do it again.”

I shouldn't have said "nobody", maybe you can do it. But as you said, it's not something to count on.

And novice programmers watching experienced programmers debug often *think* that is what is happening because they don't yet understand the process and because it goes by too fast to understand.

Advice to a novice programmer

From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus

^{The Universe of Discourse : Advice to a novice programmer}

And there is the problem... It is almost impossible to get the "client" to give you the answers you need and when they do, it is often like pulling teeth to get the second question answered.

Often in that situation, I will start with sudoku until the client gives me enough that I can re-create their failure myself and then switch to minesweeper to do the actual troubkeshooting.

@Scmbradley

@rich ha! That reminds me of a totally different 'two approaches to debugging' incident I remember from university.

I was sitting in a friend's room while he wrote a program. He'd written a large amount of code before testing any of it – more than I would have been inclined to do myself. So when he started trying to run it, I observed:

"You know, when I debug, it's like hunting. Lay tempting bait, sit very still, try to entice the elusive bug to show itself, then bring it down with a single shot. But you're spurring your horse into a whole army of bugs, laying about you left and right with a broadsword, bringing several down in every stroke, but there are always more."

(He did get the thing to work, though, as I remember! Just a difference of preference in what order we liked to do things.)

@essjayjay I agree that when you feel as if you've solved a problem in a flash of intuition, there might have been more logic in your subconscious's approach than your conscious mind realised.

But I include in the Sudoku approach the _conscious_ use of logic to reason about the clues you already have and narrow down possibilities. It's still the Sudoku approach if you're perfectly well aware of all the logic you're using!

@djm62 that would be a great way to show that a character in film or TV was superintelligent.

I've never tried it with even a _small_ Sudoku (like the kind Solo calls 2x3), but I would assume it's way too hard.

On the other hand, there's a puzzle type found in some British newspapers (whose name I've forgotten) which involves arranging the numbers 1—9 in a 3×3 grid given some clues about the sum of digits in certain subsets of the grid. I used to find those lying around in the office kitchen, and I could (just about) do one entirely in my head, which avoided spoiling it for the next person who came along.

You sound like a person who would have had Minesweeper blow up in your face quite often. 😆

.

I've always seen Minesweeper as primarily a logic game.

But sometimes devolving into having some probability driven moves -- as in, when logic is insufficient, which move is least risky?

And sometimes, relatively rarely, just a gamble -- when you have N moves, each equally risky.

This sounds good.

But I like to make hypotheses which I then try to disprove. Often a moment of thought can outweigh a flurry of action, and instead guide fewer more focused ones. Like Hercule Poirot.

I try to disprove easy to disprove ones earliest. So "have I actually saved the file" is out of the way.

I also try to make it so I know the potential causes are limited; write a bit of code and tests in small steps, constrain with types.

Another thing: the Sudoku solution is great for really common problems that we've all seen before, and it gives a certain degree of satisfaction to solve the problem by simple inspection (plus decades of experience).

But, it's an absolutely *terrible* example to people starting out in development. It looks like you just guess the solution and get it right. This leads to (e.g.) students approaching problems with random hacking.

1/n

I find it interesting that in mathematics the two approaches, Sudoku and Minesweeper, are really the same: in math the way you gather further clues is by thinking and deducing something useful!

In debugging a prorgam the two approaches are different because there are non-thinking-and-deducing way of running experiments to obtain clues: reading log files or executing the code, possibly with minor modifications or under control of a debugger.

The same thing applies to hardware debug.

Except that sometimes minesweeper debugging involves probes that cost >$20K or frying another expensive prototype PCB to see how it behaves if you twiddle some variable.

I feel like you're describing something similar to using experience vs method to debug. Experience tells you that this clue or that is likely to mean a particular thing is causing the problem. Being methodical means investigating exactly what's happening, using a debugger/adding print statements, reading through code paths etc. until you know exactly what the problem must be.

For me, the skill is in knowing when to switch from experience to method. Trade off speed/reliability.

You forgot the "workaround" approach, when you know the symptoms but not the source of the problem and you just invent a loose patch that is likely to fall off or have side effects.

But I don't know which game is the right allegory.

The demons about to be let loose upon us all by low cost cyber warfare script-kiddies enabled with AI...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/chatgpt-is-enabling-script-kiddies-to-write-functional-malware/

https://towardsdatascience.com/are-we-ready-for-the-script-kiddies-of-ai-754b23f5fcf8/

https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2025/04/01/from-script-kiddies-to-ai-cybercriminals-the-weaponization-of-genai-in-ddos-attacks/

https://www.technewsworld.com/story/ai-chatbots-can-be-easy-prey-for-zero-knowledge-hackers-179652.html

https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-features/developers-beware-ai-coding-tools-may-aid-hackers/

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/effective-fast-and-unrecoverable-wiper-malware-is-popping-up-everywhere/

https://cybernews.com/security/x-ddos-attack-osint-research-reveals-script-kiddie-dark-storm-hackers/

Effective, fast, and unrecoverable: Wiper malware is popping up everywhere

Wiper malware from no fewer than 9 families has appeared this year. Now there are 2 more.

^{Dan Goodin (Ars Technica)}

Related:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/03/1112604/deepseek-fortune-teller-china/

How DeepSeek became a fortune teller for China’s youth

AI-powered BaZi analysis has become the new oracle for a disillusioned generation seeking answers.

^{Caiwei Chen (MIT Technology Review)}

thus the eldritch horror began to teach us how to summon its demons

( https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@eniko/114545305544219785 )

Eniko Fox

2025-05-21 10:17:35

AI is an eldritch horror. it is an incomprehensibly vast being but without physical form, not truly alive or aware of anything, though it consumes human knowledge and spits out a perversion of it. those who get too close to it are driven mad, and worship it as a deity that will lead them to salvation, even though it is not even aware of them and will lead them to destruction instead

@dangerdyke Okay.

In that case, the point of the OP, I presume, is that since the UK basically rulled that trans women aren't a thing that actually exists, topless trans women can't be arrested because they'd be classified as men and hence being topless would be a non-issue.

@dangerdyke "Buddy?"

I'm sorry, but I'm losing interest in this thread.

The differences between cis and trans people using this ring are astonishing.

You can use the ring for other things then to completely destroy your body? 😲