Microsoft CEO Bill Gates was passionate about playing Minesweeper. With a trick, he could finally be freed from it.
The small game Minesweeper is still known to many. This small, graphically inconspicuous game was installed on every Windows system back then. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates was almost obsessed with this game and achieving new high scores.
The story of the Minesweeper addiction and the trick is told by journalist Kyle Orland in his book, which you can currently support on Kickstarter.
A macro frees Bill Gates from his addiction
To free him from his addiction, his colleague Bruce Ryan came up with a trick. As soon as you click on a field in Minesweeper, all the fields in the surrounding area without a mine are revealed. With a certain layout, where all mines were positioned in a particular corner, you could win the game directly with one click. But to do that, you have to play for hours until you hit the perfect combination.
Ryan wrote a macro with the Windows software “Macro Recorder” that always clicked on a specific corner and then started a new round of the game.
I set it up there and then went to a meeting for a day, and four hours later it had [won in one second] while I was away. I felt very efficient because I did that while I wasn’t even in the office.
He then sent a screenshot of it to Bill Gates, whom he explained that his old record had been broken and that he surely couldn’t beat the new 1-second record. Gates replied that these things were going too far:
My critical skills are being overshadowed by a computer. This technology thing is going too far. If machines can do things faster than humans, how can we still preserve our human dignity?
As early as 2018, Bill Gates was impressed by artificial intelligence. Back then it was still about bots for Dota 2, which the Microsoft CEO declared a milestone.
Today, technology is capable of much different things than it was 20 years ago. For example, the company OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, wanted to find out if an artificial intelligence could play Minecraft. And it actually works, but the path to it is long and difficult:
AI can play Minecraft like a human – It just had to watch 70,000 hours on YouTube
