What I would do... store your point that is blank in an array @free = ([2,3]) Then do a while($ary = shift @free) Which will give you the first free point. Then write some code that looks at all the all the adjacent boxes. Open them all up, and if any of them have no mines near them, do a push @free, (new,point); What that will do is use @free as a stack, and basically recurse through it analyzing all necessary points until you are done.

You should probably also use a hash to store which points you have visited around the stack and ignore them. something like

# point is 3,5 $x = 3 $y = 5
next if $seen{"$x,$y")++; #checks and then increments in one line
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Otherwise you could just loop infinately :) - Ant