{"id":9955,"date":"2011-10-04T03:00:19","date_gmt":"2011-10-04T08:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=9955"},"modified":"2011-10-04T03:00:19","modified_gmt":"2011-10-04T08:00:19","slug":"overthinking-the-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/9955","title":{"rendered":"Overthinking the Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By <em>overthinking<\/em> I mean <em>spending a lot of time modeling the problem<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/thevirtuosi.blogspot.com\/2011\/10\/linear-theory-of-battleship.html\">The Linear Theory of Battleship<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I wrote a little code to generate random Battleship boards, and counted where each of the ships appeared. I did this billions of times to get good statistics, and what I ended up with is a little interesting. You can see the results for yourself over at my<br \/>\nresults exploration page by changing the radio buttons for the ship you are interested in, but I have some screen caps below.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026<\/p>\n<p>This is an example of the failure of the linear model. All the linear model knows is that in the spots nearby misses there is a lower probability of the ship being there, but what it doesn&#8217;t know to do is look at the arrangement of misses and check to see whether there is any possible way the ship can fit. This is a nonlinear effect, involving information at more than one square at a time.<\/p>\n<p>It is these kinds of effects that this theory will miss, but as you&#8217;ll notice, it still does pretty well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m wondering if it does as well against human opponents, who would not place the targets randomly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By overthinking I mean spending a lot of time modeling the problem. The Linear Theory of Battleship I wrote a little code to generate random Battleship boards, and counted where each of the ships appeared. I did this billions of &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/9955\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game","category-math"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9955\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}