Recently, I was in the position of trying to explain to a 6- and 8- year old how to play the board game Battleship. (Kids from my generation had commercials that seemed to explain the basics of the game fairly well.) While trying to explain the concept of the grid to them and search algorithms, I couldn’t help but wonder, “How could this be done in Mathcad Prime?”
This month’s challenge, should you choose to accept it, is fairly open-ended: simulate various aspects of the Battleship game in Mathcad. Here are some suggestions:
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Write a program that will place the ships on the ocean grid. The ships must be placed horizontally or vertically; no diagonals. Ships can’t overlap one another. Do you place the ships randomly or according to some kind of optimized algorithm?
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Alternatively, can you use Advanced Input Controls to allow the user to place the ships on the ocean grid?
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Display the placement of the ships using the plotting capability.
- Write an algorithm for hunting the ships. Do you use something like a random walk? A standard grid search? Your own preferred algorithm from when you were a kid?
- Alternatively, use Advanced Input Controls to let the user enter their own coordinates. Use these same controls to provide feedback to the user on hit or miss. (Note: David Newman and I discussed whether you could use Advanced Input Controls for the user to enter guesses and have Mathcad keep track of previous shots. David said that it doesn't work like that. I thought you could append new guesses to an existing matrix; if that doesn't work, I think the brain power we have in the community can figure out a way. That have surprised me before.)
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Display the hits and misses on a plot or chart.
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Can you program Mathcad Prime to run through a number of iterations of placing and hunting ships, and then evaluate statistics on number of shots needed to sink the fleet?
Again, these are just suggestions. Feel free to create a worksheet that tackles any aspects of the classic board game. Do as little or as much as you like. Also, your worksheet should stand on its own; a stranger should be able to open it and understand what it’s for.
For the sake of this challenge, we will use the following ships:
- Aircraft carrier 5
- Battleship 4
- Cruiser 3
- Submarine 3
- Destroyer 2
It’s a kids game, so have fun with this!
Find the Mathcad Community Challenge Guidelines here!
In the version of the game I posted a few days ago was an error in the function which places a ship in the game board which prevented ships from using part of the upper half of the board and the rightmost column.
Since I am therefore forced to provide an error-corrected version, I took the opportunity to implement an additional “verbose” mode.
When this is activated, the program also provides information about which ship was hit when a hit occurs.
Furthermore if a ship is sunk the appropriate info is also displayed and additionally the ship is framed with an orange border.
The cheat mode also shows borders around the ship if verbose mode is on:
I wished I would have planned the verbose mode right from the start as I sure would have written the sheet in a different way and probably would have turned more calculations into functions. But, alas, that's just how things are...
EDIT: I made a minor change and therefore replaced the file. In verbose mode, the ship overview now also shows how many parts of a ship have already been hit. However, the display is not an indicator of which parts have been hit.
Prime 11 file attached
EDIT (20251111): Just noticed that in the attached file the playing field was slightly compressed vertically and did not match the vertical slider. So a new file was attached (no other changes made).
@DaveMartin wrote:
For the sake of this challenge, we will use the following ships:
- Aircraft carrier 5
- Battleship 4
- Cruiser 3
- Submarine 3
- Cruiser 2
Dave, can I just confirm - is that list of ships definitive, ie one and only one of each 'ship'? Or would it be fair to say,
Edited to add:
It's just that I was thinking of adding a little historicity to the proceedings.
Clearly not totally accurate. For example, Campbeltown took the St Nazaire docks up with her during Operation Chariot, and I don't think Yamato is due for her afterlife upgrade for another 174 years.
Stuart
Happy Birthday in advance, and here's a little birthday present ...
Although I'm not sure it's a very good birthday present, installing your namesake ship as something that somebody will be hoping to pound into scrap. Still, you're in good company.
Stuart
(Hopefully, that will give me time to complete my game proposal - it seems as if I'm enjoying a recurrence of long-term, intermittent dreaded lurgi, which is slowing things down a bit)
History Name USS Newman Namesake Laxton Gail Newman Ordered 1942 Builder Charleston Navy Yard Laid down 8 June 1943 Launched 9 August 1943 Commissioned 26 November 1943 Decommissioned 18 February 1946 Reclassified APD-59, 5 July 1944 Stricken 1 September 1964 Honors andawards 5 battle stars (World
