[LRUG] Battleships last night

[Chris Lowis]

I never found the time to implement a player, sadly, but I did really
enjoying reading this paper:

http://www.cores2.com/files/FinalResearchPaper.pdf

In it the author describes a learning algorithm to optimise ship
placement by learning from its opponent over the course of many games.
I suspect that wouldn't have worked very well in a best of three match
though.

I also enjoyed the monte-carlo simulation approach to generating the
ship placement - a little similar to Gunter.

For the attacking strategy the paper describes a state-machine which
again using a genetic algorithm to learn the best time to switch
between states to effectively hunt and sink the enemy ships.

It would be fun if the DRB server was left running and we could submit
new or improved bots over time :)

Cheers,

Chris