Yeah, I remember reading about that effort a while back. I was really amazed that of all those games, only one single game was absolutely impossible. I should get my awful college statistics teacher to ponder over that one for a while

My dad isn't going through them one by one (I think). He usually gets them at random, and plays each one until he wins.

The guesswork factor is also why I stopped playing Minesweeper. The problem is that if the guesswork is eliminated, the game is incredibly simple. That's why the "advanced" mode for the Windows version is so hard, you always end up blindly clicking away. Plus, you learn little strategies. For example, I found that if you had a flat wall of numbers, and you had a 1-2-1 pattern, there was never a mine under the 2.

By the way, I never figured it out, what the heck is the purpose of marking squares in minesweeper?