Bill Gates is obsessed with Minesweeper and can’t compete with bot players

The Minesweeper game was originally a program designed to teach people how to use a mouse, but it has become a very popular game that many office workers are addicted to. It is reported that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is also one of the fans of Minesweeper game. His enthusiasm for this game even reached the level of "addiction", so much so that his then-girlfriend Melinda French (IT Home) Note: She later became his wife and is currently divorced) asked others not to disclose the new mine clearance record to Bill Gates.

This story is from the book Minesweeper by Kyle Orland. According to former Microsoft project manager Chris Fitzgerald, the Minesweeper game was originally developed as a testing tool for the Windows 3.1 operating system, but was later played as a game by many employees. Microsoft has even created a leaderboard that records the shortest time it takes to complete the game at each difficulty level. Bill Gates is one of the active participants.

Fitzgerald said, "Bill was addicted at the time. I once received an email from Bill, and he said, 'I just took 10 seconds in [junior] Minesweeper. Is that a good result? ?’ I replied to him and said, ‘Yeah, 10 seconds is pretty good. Our current record is 8 seconds.’ Obviously, he was so close to breaking it that he was determined to beat it.”

Gates played Minesweeper so much that someone uninstalled the game from his computer, but that didn't stop him from continuing his record attempt. He even went to other people's offices to play Minesweeper. Once, Gates set a new record in a Minesweeper game and invited Fitzgerald to verify it. It was a weekend night, and Bill's call came from the office of Mike Hallman, the president of Microsoft at the time.

Melinda French, who later married Bill Gates, once asked Microsoft employees not to tell Gates about the new record so as not to distract from what he should focus on as CEO, "for the company." For your own sake... please do not share with Bill the progress regarding the Minesweeper record... Bill has a lot of important decisions to make, and these matters should not take up (his) time!"

Fitzgerald did not tell Guy Withholding the new record, Ci decided to play Minesweeper over and over again using a program called Macro Recorder, which he hoped would create an unbreakable record, which it did. Fitzgerald sent Gates a screenshot of the "one-second" record (Mine Sweeper's timer starts at one second) and said, "I'm sorry your five-second record has been permanently eclipsed because I don't think you can." Beat a second."

Gates seemed to take the prank in stride, replying, "My critical skills were replaced by computers. This technology is advancing so fast. When machines can do more than humans can How do we maintain our human dignity when we move faster?"

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