A few months ago, Wei-Hwa Huang wrote a minesweeper widget for Google homepages. His minesweeper featured variations on the classic game. He announced today on his blog that he’s added a new variation, wraparound minesweeper, to his widget.

I just found this site today which has all of Wei Hwa’s old puzzle challenges dating back to the beginning.  So, anyone looking for a URL for the minesweeper by google challenge (as was asked inthe comments), here it is.  The others are there as well.

Wei Hwa’s challenge this week is minesweeper and I’m fairly certain that no one will be looking for solutions. To make it interesting, he’s included some variations.

• Zero - Instead of leaving a block empty if there are no mines around it, he puts a zero in the block. This is actually slightly annoying since it doesn’t really add a dimension to the game and only requires you to click with the center button a lot more. This seems to be a bridge variation, in the sense that a lot of the later variations require a zero.
• Spider - The mine layout changes, but not for spaces that you’ve already revealed (however, flagged blocks can change.) Mostly, playing this game involves center clicking the zeroes in the middle of the board until the mines are all arounf the edges.
• Symbol - The numbers are changed to symbols. I kind of think that to make this one really challenging though, they should disable the center click. Otherwise, it’s too easy to discover early what the symbols represent.
• Memory - Blocks are never cleared. Clicking on a block reveals what’s beneath, but it’s soon covered up again.
• Knight - Numbers indicate how many mines are a chess knight’s move away. It’s fun because center clicking actually reflects this.

Wei-Hwa’s challenge this week is a distance puzzle like the ones created by Erich Friedman.  Wei-Hwa uses the puzzle to plug the Google US Puzzle Competition that is happening next Saturday (more on that later) and, I have to say, that competition is where I first came across distance puzzles.

Distance puzzles involve a series of circles arranged in a specific pattern.  The object is to fill each cirle with the numbers from 1 to however many circles there are such that the distance between 2 and 3 is greater than the distance between 1 and 2, and so on.  If you would like to see some examples of this puzzles, check out Erich’s page.

Wei-Hwa’s variation is a little bit different.  He doesn’t require you to fill in all of the squares, and I haven’t decided yet if that makes it easier or harder.  Also, his flash interface automatically calculates distances for you when you place numbers.  (Do you remember your distance formula?)  It might be a good idea to play around with his interface a little before you get solving, just so you can get a sense of how many possible unique distances there are betweem two numbers.

Thanks to Matthew, I now have a little bit more analysis on Wei-Hwa’s first puzzle challenge.

There is a well known math game that involves taking four small integers and using them to create a mathematical expression equal to 24. In the case of Wei-Hwa’s challenge the integers are 8, 8, 3, and 3. Now, of course, not all number sets can be used to create an expression equal to 24, but approximately 80% of sets formed with low integers will work.

Matthew points out that you can try to make expressions that equal other integers. Or see how many integral results you can get with a set. From the post:

“2 5 9 10″ will produce 79 of the numbers from 0 to 100 and 124 distinct values overall. It’s first miss is 41.

It’s a simple puzzle with fancier stuff promised in the future.

The puzzle asks you to take the numbers 3, 3, 8, and 8, arrange them in a specific order and create a mathematical expression that equals 24. You can use addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. All of the numbers must be used.