Sometimes you just have to guess
It seems like you can do just about anything professionally. Every so often I stumble across a professional organization for an activity I used to take part in casually, and hours later I’ll find myself reading a Wikipedia article about the 2004 World Backgammon Championships or watching my twentieth R/C airplane race video in a row.
The latest one was Minesweeper. Who among us hasn’t run out the clock before our lunch break with a little minesweeping? The other day I stumbled across Minesweeper world records, and I was fascinated with the passionate community that has sprung up around something I used to do to kill five minutes now and then. There are finely-detailed comparisons of various versions of the game, a dozen different metrics that are used to evaluate completion times, click efficiency and board difficulty, and of course, more statistics than you can shake a baseball fan at. “Hey, I know how to play Minesweeper,” thought I. Visions of glory, trophies and lucrative sponsorships danced in my head, and so, ready to claim my rightful place among the world’s elite, I downloaded the official software—so that I could track my times down to 1/100 of a second, like any serious Sweeper—and began clicking.
Spoiler alert: I will not be setting a world record in this particular discipline. But it has been fun to dust off an old idle pastime and challenge myself to learn new strategies in an effort to keep improving my time. One of the basic strategies is to recognize a situation where you’re forced to guess, so that you don’t add wasted seconds to the timer while you try to figure it out. If the odds are 50/50 and there’s no more information coming, just pick a square and—if you don’t blow up—move on.
Fast forward to a weekend in early January and the strange sense of déjà vu I experienced as I decided whether or not to send my five-year-old back to school in person. Despite rising case numbers, schools were reopening with few layers of protection in place, and parents were trying to decide if it was safe for kids to return to class. I agonized over the choice: send him to school, where there seemed to be a very good chance he’d catch COVID, or keep him home, where I know he’d miss his friends and where (let’s be honest) we wouldn’t get as much learning done.
I spent an entire evening marking as many bombs as I could find and clearing as many squares. What are the risks? What are the numbers? What are the experts saying? What do we know about long COVID in kids? What are the projections for a week from now? A month?
I wish that after all of that I could have double-clicked and had the answer revealed. (Minesweeper pro tip: try clicking on a cleared square with both mouse buttons at the same time to reveal all the squares around it at once. Game changer.) But in the end, there simply wasn’t enough information to show that one choice was definitively better than the other. And so, I went with my gut and picked one.
Nothing blew up. But whether it did or not, we’d have found a way to deal with it. When I was younger, I believed—like most kids—that grown-ups pretty much had life figured out, and I looked forward to having my life together one day. Then I discovered—like absolutely every adult ever—that we don’t have anything figured out at all, and usually we’re just winging it one day at a time. As parents, we all need to take a Minesweeper guess every now and then, as disconcerting as it may be. Make your best choice, and then keep on clicking.