Minesweeper

With all the to-do and hub-bub with regards to World Pi Day (see post below), I have been on a math kick. Now, back in my youth…hmm…back in my college days (not too long ago) I got pretty fanatic about Minesweeper. I quickly found that Beginner and Intermediate were for n00bs like Boink and moved on to Expert. Having solved Expert countless times, I found myself recognizing patterns faster and found the increase in pattern recognition to correlate positively with lower completion times. Alas, I burned out prior to breaking the 100 second threshold. However, I recently (read: minutes ago) came across a website that showed me that my Minesweeper foray could have developed into a $1,000,000 pursuit, had I realized that Minesweeper is NP-complete. It was at this point in the article (a good two headings in) that things went really over my head, but the guy claims Minesweeper to be the key one of the most important proofs (or disproofs (a word???)) in the current mathematical world!!! Oh snap! Is he right? Who knows…read it for yourself and find out.