There was no “no adjacency” rule in the official board game. This jumped out at me when I read the article; it is a significant change.

Also, the board game had a different ship length distribution; the board game is biased towards fewer, longer ships:

1x Len 5

1x Len 4

2x Len 3

1x Len 2

The length one ships in the article are weird, especially with the no adjacency rule they quickly rule out large sections of the board.