Game of battleship logic puzzle

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Homework Help Overview

The discussion revolves around a logic puzzle based on the game of Battleship, where participants are tasked with deploying a fleet consisting of various types of ships on a grid while adhering to specific placement rules. The problem involves understanding the constraints of ship placement, including the requirement for empty squares around each ship.

Discussion Character

  • Exploratory, Assumption checking, Problem interpretation

Approaches and Questions Raised

  • Participants share their attempts at solving the puzzle using different methods, including paper and pencil as well as digital tools like Excel. There are discussions about the challenges faced in visualizing the ship placements and the implications of the placement rules.

Discussion Status

Some participants have provided tips and alternative approaches for tackling the puzzle, such as using physical cutouts of ships to visualize placements. There is an acknowledgment of the complexity of the puzzle, and participants are exploring various strategies without reaching a consensus on a solution.

Contextual Notes

Participants note that ships cannot touch each other, even at corners, and must be placed within the confines of an 8x8 grid. The discussion reflects on the difficulty of the puzzle and the need for clear visualization techniques to aid in solving it.

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Homework Statement


-Admiral, your orders are to deploy the fleet into battle formation.

-your fleet contains 1 battleship, 2 cruisers, 3 destroyers and 4 corvettes.

-battleship requires 4 squares deployment, cruiser requires 3, destroyer requires 2, and corvette requires 1

-each ship requires empty sea, on all adjacent squares to the ship, including any corner squares.

-it looks like a destroyer must be filled into the partially filled row at the bottom, because only 1 ship part must be filled into the column on the right-hand side.

-the numbers at the bottom row and the side column indicate information as follows
the number tells, how many "ship parts" are included in the according row or column.
If the number of the row, tells you 0. That fact meaans that this row cannot contain any parts of any ship.
If the number of the column tells you 3. That fact means that this column must contain exactly 3 parts of any ship/ or any ships... (the column could contain e.g. 1 cruiser OR 1 corvette + 1 destroyer)
gameofbattleship.jpg

The Attempt at a Solution


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This was a tough puzzle to do especially be cause of the large number of squarse to be filled.
I tried this several times on paper with pencil but it seemed like I had wrong tactic in attempting to solve the problem.

This problem was one of the harder logic puzzles in our class (In my opinion). The class is now over but I thought that it was a funny math exercise so I decided to post it here and see how you guys respond to it.

It looks like the best tactic for a renewed attempt at solving is to imagine the empty squares around any ship that you are trying to fit into the puzzle at any given location. And try to fill any "obvious" ship locations first, and attempt to construct the winning battlefleet deployment from there on.
 
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my attempt at solving this inside an excel sheet.

I kind of feel bad because I was not really able to solve this problem with pen-and-paper.
I did it with excel turning and twisting the battleships and arrange
I think that using computer... I definitely felt more at ease. Because it's easier to erase wrong answers and fill in the blanks, when you attempt a new solution with the warships being deployed.pen-and-paper turns everything into a terrible mess when you erase too many times the paper...
battleship solution puzzle.jpg
 
Here's one tip that I was thinking about.

If you only have pen and paper and scissors. You need paper with squares in it.

1. take a page
2. colour the different size and shape warships into the page.
3. leave empty squares on the outlines of each warship
4. cut the warship pieces out with scissors.

5 try to rearrenge the pieces.

you could also cut out the backboard with maybe 10x10
draw the numbers indicating the number of ship parts after that.
 
Ok

I actually misrepresented that one hint sadly.

The clue should read like this: "no two ships can touch each other, not even from any corner squares" There must be at least one square between any two ships (also the cornering squares)



If you imagine that you decide to put 1 cruiser horizontally at the bottom row. That is still ok, because the cruiser still has "empty sea" beyond the 8x8 grid on the southern side of the cruiser.
 
-ships can be deployed either horizontally or vertically (like it is normally in the game of battleship)

no diagonally deployed ships
 

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