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Whilst playing minesweeper on this website, I ended up with the following position:

Minesweeper game page

In this, how is possible to solve the puzzle without guessing? Given that there are 4 squares remaining, and 2 mines remaining, it seems to me that the first mine can be located anywhere on the 2x2 squares left and the second mine will be on either of the two squares of the horizontally opposite rectangle that remains unclicked/unflagged.

noob anomaly
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    Your version seems to be close to the original windows minesweeper which may require guesswork. If you play at https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/mines.html here instead, the puzzles are automatically generated in a way that guarantees it is possible to solve them without guessing. – quarague Jan 19 '23 at 10:41
  • I'd say https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/288247/what-do-i-do-when-two-squares-are-equally-valid is a duplicate, but the community has deemed each puzzle unique. – Timmy Jim Jan 19 '23 at 14:02

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Of the 4 available options, bottom right is NOT a mine because to the bottom right is a 1 that is already connected to the mine above it.

The bottom right will become a 4. After that the space left of it wil be a mine.

Now here the problem returns, the top 2 wil always be a 50/50 guess in this scenario. There is no escaping it sadly... i ran in to this problem several times before.

A.bakker
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  • I missed the bottom right square part, but after your reading your answer it suddenly hit me. But as you mentioned the problem remains, whilst actually playing this game, I had by luck cleared the bottom row without hitting the mine; however, the it is still not possible to clear the top row without guess-work. Is it actually quite common for this scenario to occur? I ask this because when I play the google minigame minesweeper, this has never happened to me (and I usually play Google's minesweeper); however, for some reason Google's minigame wasn't working for me, so I had to try another web. – noob anomaly Jan 19 '23 at 09:21
  • @noobanomaly it can always accor, one at expert level i was below 150 seconds and had to make the 50/50 guess. .. i guessed wrong – A.bakker Jan 19 '23 at 09:54