and 17 must stay

My opinion: most popular association. Most people were introduced to minesweeper through Windows. I don't think the author is necessarily name dropping, but just setting the stage in the most familiar way for most.

At least I hope rows are numbered top down like in "2D arrays", and not bottom up.

Thanks. I guess that means back to the drawing board for me :)

An array with an empty array is perfectly reasanoble to be able to represent the state of a matrix with rows and columns

yes, they both are

Is

+-+ +-+
| | | |
| +-+ |
|     |
+-----+

valid input?

How about

+-----+
|     |
| +-+ |
| | | |
| +-+ |
|     |
+-----+

?

"EDIT: I have found that 1551121e25 is 25 factorial."

No, it's not.

Thanks.

no because it's x and y like indexes of a 2D array, not x and y like in "real life axis"

edit: right, I'll update the description for consistency

edit²: done

"I've preload a method open, usage is open(row,column) (for Java users: Game.open(int x, int y))."

Should that be "Game.open(int y, int x)"?

(or "Game.open(int row, int column)" for consistency)

https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/195:_Map_of_the_Internet

Don't use doubles.