squeakynick

I am the article author.

Thank you to the numerous people who took to time to email me and correct me about a definition. In this article, I refer to the entire root of a domain name e.g. Amazon.com as the TLD. I made a mistake, it is just the .com component of this name that is the TLD. I hope this error didn’t mask the enjoyment of the article for you. I appreciate all the feedback I receive.

I get what you are saying, but you can only pick one square to fire on next. Knowing the exact probability of every square left (differnetiating between white and almost white), does not help you if, on each move, you take the square with the next highest probability.

If you have a bag containing 85 red balls, 10 yellow balls, 3 blue, and 2 black, and had to draw one and predict its color, are you going to change your answer about red even if you are told that someone stole one of the blue balls before you picked? :)

Actually it does take this into account (in a roundabout way). After two hits on the last ship it does know orientation of the ship. It gets this information by applying a massive weighting to the locations where the ship could be that pass through this location.

"and so hit squares are treated as unvisited space squares for deciding if a ship 'could' pass through this square, and then a heavy score weighting is granted to possible locations that pass through a point we know already know contains a hit."

You'll notice that as soon as it wings the ship and knows the orientation that it continues in that direction.

(I concede your point, however, that without this weighting the probability density would be the superposition of all possible locations of the ship independant of other information - that would be a much more complex calculation).

As to how best to place the ships, there is no correct answer, as those who study game theory will tell you. If you had a strategy, then if the opponent knew that there was this strategy, then he could foil you be firing into these locations first, but if you knew that he knew ... etc.

See this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

Yes, I do!

They are nothing more fancy than Excel graphs.

The other illustrations were made in Publisher.

No, we should still go for the letter with the highest frequency.

If we get a hit, it's not just the presence, or not, of the letter, we learn both the number of hits, and the positions of these hits. These are incredibly valuable pieces of information (more valuable that dividing the remaining words into two equal piles).

If we miss, we've carved away and removed the biggest non-possible set of words with one guess.

Good comments. Being paranoid, I double checked the database I used! Neither 'qi' nor 'za' are in the database I used.

I'm not arguing that they are, or are not, words. I'm just saying that they were not in the dictionaty file I used :)

Cool