Minesweeper Research Papers

Incremental Game Development in an Introductory Programming Course (1994)

Holliday uses Minesweeper and Master Mind to teach students how to code.

Discount learnability evaluation (1995)

Santos and Badre use Minesweeper to test learnability. They define a period of uninterupted thought and create a Minesweeper game that records mouse clicks with timestamps. Each person was given 9 playing sessions with one group untrained and one group given lessons. The untrained group increased "chunk" size from 1.14 to 1.96 clicks while the trained group increased chunk size from 1.13 clicks to 3.31 clicks thus demonstrating better pattern recognistion.

Addicted to logic (1999)

Dana Mackenzie describes how Minesweeper can be used as an educational tool for improving logic skills.

Teaching with Games: The Minesweeper and Asteroids Experience (2001)

Katrin Becker ran an experiment showing student motivation increased when Minesweeper was used in class to teach programming.

ObSys – a Tool for Visualizing Usability Evaluation Patterns with Mousemaps (2003)

Gellner and Forbrig develop a tool called ObSys to track mouse interactions with video games and use Minesweeper to test the program.

Understanding Concerns in Software: Insights Gained from Two Case Studies (2005)

Revelle, Broadbent and Coppit use Java version of Minesweeper with 3000 lines of code to explore how programmers identify coding concerns.

Evaluación de estrategias de razonamiento para sistemas basados en reglas (2006)

Martín and Agudo use Wumpus and Minesweeper to teach students how to program solvers for rule based systems.

Face as mouse through visual face tracking (2007)

Tu et al. use camera software to play Minesweeper and Solitaire with their facial expressions.

AI as a Gameplay Analysis Tool (2008)

Kirby uses Minesweeper and Sudoku to show how small amounts of AI can illuminate core gameplay and lead to new gameplay concepts. A potential two-player Minesweeper is discussed with demonstration software included.

Minesweeper for sensor networks - making event detection in sensor networks dependable (2009)

Hein and Weiss present a method inspired by Minesweeper for detecting faults on networks.

Is it Time for New Terminology in Land Release and Technical Survey? (2009)

Keeley uses a custom version of Minesweeper to demonstrate the effectiveness of landmine sweeping techniques.

Minesweeper and Hypothetical Thinking Action Research & Pilot Study (2010)

Jacob Walker ran a pilot study to test whether playing Minesweeper improves hypothetical thinking skills.

Quantum Computer Games: Quantum Minesweeper (2011)

Gordon & Gordon introduce quantum Minesweeper for teaching purposes. Players are presented with 3 superimposed classical grids and use classical reasoning and entanglement to flag mines in order to "collapse" wave functions until the full quantum state is known.

Hand controlled 3D minesweeper (2012)

Mendoza and Figueroa develop a 3D Minesweeper game using hand movement to interact with the console.

Colisweeper (2013)

Colisweeper is an interactive, biological version of the computer game Minesweeper. The goal is to clear an agar “minefield” without detonating the mines. A dedicated site explains how genetically engineered Escherichia coli colonies can be used as mines and non-mines.

On Evaluating Human Problem Solving of Computationally Hard Problems (2013)

Carruthers and Stege discuss how computer science, and more exactly computational complexity theory, can inform cognitive science. Referencing the previous paper by Stege "Minesweeper May Not Be NP-Complete but Is Hard Nonetheless" (2011), the authors suggest Minesweeper should include a common feature in solving algorithms known as "backtracking" to aid learning.

Mobile User Authentication Scheme Based on Minesweeper Game (2013)

Kim et al. propose a Minesweeper based password authentication scheme for mobile phones.

Examining brain activity while playing computer games (2016)

Bakaoukas et al. investigate brain activity while playing Minesweeper and three other games. The authors show that different games produce different brain wave patterns holding environmental factors constant.

Analysis of Single-Agent Game: Case Study using Minesweeper (2020)

Wu et al. explore game refinement theory in order to understand why Minesweeper is popular.

Design and Implementation of C# Minesweeper Game Software (2021)

Zhang et al. write a Minesweeper game in C# and discuss algorithms and design.

The Bullets Puzzle: A Paper-and-Pencil Minesweeper (2022)

Todd Neller and Hien Tran discuss a paper variation of Minesweeper that is always solvable.