Abstract

Minesweeper is a one-person game which looks deceptively easy to play, but where average human performance is far from optimal. Playing the game requires logical, arithmetic and probabilistic reasoning based on spatial relationships on the board. Simply checking a board state for consistency is an NP-complete problem. Given the difficulty of hand-crafting strategies to play this and other games, AI researchers have always been interested in automatically learning such strategies from experience. In this paper, we show that when integrating certain techniques into a general purpose learning system (Mio), the resulting system is capable of inducing a Minesweeper playing strategy that beats the winning rate of average human players. In addition, we discuss the necessary background knowledge, present experimental results demonstrating the gain obtained with our techniques and show the strategy learned for the game. 1

Citations