Minesweeper Engine

This is a minesweeper implementation in python. It is not an interactive game, but an engine for evaluating game AI algorithms. Versions made for interactive playing tend to not place any mines until the player has selected the first square and may layout the mines to guarantee success if the player is perfect. This implementation does neither.

Installing

This requires pygame. On a Debian-based system, it can be installed with sudo apt-get install python-pygame. Full instructions for installing pygame are at http://www.pygame.org/download.shtml.

Running a game

The minesweeper module contains a run function that accepts the game configuration, number of games, and the AI.

from minesweeper import *

num_games = 100
config = GameConfig(width=50, height=50, num_mines=20)
ai = MyAI()
results = run_games(config, num_games, ai)

Building your AI

An AI must implement the GameAI interface with three methods: init(), next(), and update(). init() should clear any state of the AI and is called before starting a new game. It receives as a parameter the game configuration which includes the width and height of the board and the number of mines. next() is called for each move and should return the x and y coordinates of the next move as a tuple. The coordinates are zero-based. update() is called after the move has been processed and receives the result of the move.

An AI that randomly selects each move would look like the following:

class RandomAI(GameAI):
    def __init__(self):
        self.width = 0
        self.height = 0
        self.exposed_squares = set()

    def init(self, config):
        self.width = config.width
        self.height = config.height
        self.exposed_squares.clear()

    def next(self):
        while True:
            x = random.randint(0, self.width - 1)
            y = random.randint(0, self.height - 1)
            if (x, y) not in self.exposed_squares:
                break
        return x, y

    def update(self, result):
        for position in result.new_squares:
            self.exposed_squares.add((position.x, position.y))

Running with the visualizer

A visualizer is included to help debug and improve an AI. You can step through each move with either a timed delay or pressing the enter key. This is selected during construction:

viz = GameVisualizer(2)

or

viz = GameVisualizer('key')

The visualizer is then passed to the run function:

results = run_games(config, num_games, ai, viz)

Standard game sizes

Classic Microsoft Minesweeper had 3 standard game sizes:

• Beginner: 8 x 8 with 10 mines
• Intermediate: 16 x 16 with 40 mines
• Expert: 30 x 16 with 99 mines