Do you have what it takes to be the Ultimate Battleship Commander?

In this assignment, you and your group will compete against the other groups for glory, for fame, and for incredible prizes!

Your objective is to describe a strategy for choosing where to fire shots in order to sink an enemy fleet. Your intrepid professor Riley will program your strategy you describe into a computer, and then test it against ten thousand different randomly positioned enemy fleets! Using this, Riley will compute on average how many shots it takes to sink a fleet. The winning team will be the one with the lowest average number of shots. The members of the winning group will reap the following rewards

  • the members proclaimed on the Canvas homepage
  • their strategy will be posted publicly
  • the members get real-world fantastic and amazing prizes (announced after).

That’s right folks. It could be food. It could be swag. It could be yours.

Instructions

Your group must agree on what you think will be the best strategy for sinking a standard fleet in Battleship in as few shots as possible. You must then describe your strategy in a single page, typed up. Only one submission per group is allowed. Your strategy can be super elaborate, but you have to be able to describe it in a very clear and detailed way on a single page. If what you want done is not clear from how it is written, the submission will need to be revised by the group. Part of the idea of the exercise is thinking about how to be precise with language. Communicating technical information to other people in a clear way is a key part of math! Some examples of possible submissions are given below. (Hopefully your strategy is more clever though!)

  • Submission deadline: midnight on September 17th
  • Submissions are mandatory and will be graded.

For some example strategies that have been proposed by students in the past, see old strategies.

Here’s a research paper a student wrote last year on Battleship link to paper.