It’s a tricky business in part because we also want to minimize the information gained from a hit. Evening out the probability distribution over the whole board so that the chance of hitting a boat on some initial shot is equal over the whole set of coordinate pairs should be possible, but if it results in a tendency for the boats to be closer to the edges (which it would), then it comes with a secondary cost. Once a hit occurs the search for the other parts of the boat is shorter. It would be neat if there were a competition for Battleship-playing programs/bots…
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