This is a discussion of logical and illogical thinking and the game/movie to be--Battleship.
Yes, the first piece of broken logic--someone bought the rights to Battleship to make a movie. Trying to figure out how "B7" "Miss" will make an entertaining movie is enough to fry anyone's brain.
So of course, I set about solving that puzzle.
While I love logic, sometimes tackling those things which defy logic is a good mental exercise.
Sometimes it gives one a headache.
I enjoy the game Battleship. I see it as a good exercise in logical thinking. For the uninitiated, each player gets 5 ships of different sizes, and places them on their own grid. Then they try to find the enemy ships on the enemy grid by calling out coordinates. The first person to sink all of the opponents ships is the winner.
Some people attack the grid in a highly intuitive and random manner. Others use the most refined of logic. I hate it when the random guesser blows my ships out of the water, but statistically, it is bound to happen.
Sometimes logic works against the logical.
So I asked myself how would I plot such a movie around the basics of the game.
My answer--move it into outer space. There the great distances would make communications lag between the launching of one weapon and the result of whether it hit or missed.
But the ships sit still through out this entire battle. They don't run and hide.
Hmmmm.
The weapons use are mini and unstable-quantum singularities that will destroy anything coming in their vicinity for roughly the next three earth years. So you drop one at H3, and if a ship is there, part of it is destroyed. Now the laws of inertia make it so that a moving object would be more likely to either be hit, or run into, a targeted space.
Your submarine takes up three squares and takes 2 or 3 squares to slow to a stop. As such, if you are standing still, you will be hit if any of your three squares you are on is hit, and you will be destroyed if the 2 or 3 squares in front of you are hit and you are moving toward them.
As such, all the surviving wise admirals have their fleets come to a dead stop during battle.
Next question.
Why 5 ships?
I never thought to ask myself this question, but why 5 ships?
The ships are, Aircraft Carrier, Battleship, Submarine, Destroyer, and Mine Sweeper.
Yet they are totally useless in these facets.
If it were really an Aircraft Carrier, why not send up a flight of bombers to wipe out the enemy fleet, or at least some reconnaissance planes to help direct your fire? If the submarine dives low enough surface fire won't harm it. Where are the mines that need to be swept?
But we are moving to space, so what the ships originally were designed for is not important. We can make them be whatever we want.
Except the battleship.
We got to have one called a battleship.
That way we can complain as the old commercial used to whine, "Hey, you've sunk my battleship."
When all five are destroyed, and only when all five ships are destroyed, does one side lose and stop destroying the other.
So it would seem logical that the weapons used could be launched from any of the five ships. If the four biggest ones were destroyed and only the smallest Mine Sweeper was left (its only 2 spaces large, not 5 like the aircraft carrier), the rate of fire is the same.
Repeat, if you have just one ship left your rate of fire is the same as your opponent who may have all five ships left.
Now, if I had a fleet of five ships that each was capable of launching weapons that destroyed some spacial quadrant--you bet I wouldn't be firing them one at a time and hoping for the best. Five at a time would be launched.
I thought maybe there was something that limited your ability to tell a hit from a miss if more than one were fired at a time.
Yet that doesn't hold water. In the 100 space grid of the game, if you fire 5 weapons at a time, in 20 turns you would have destroyed everything in the grid. If you shoot one at a time, in twenty turns you would have to be very lucky to have hit and sunk all 17 spaces worth of ships.
Then there is the cost of the weapons. Maybe they don't want to waste them. Then I realized they were wasting a lot more of them--by letting them sink to the bottom of the ocean unfired.
At this point my mind gave up.
I thought Battleship a great logical game.
Yet it isn't logical.
Which as illogical as it sounds, will probably make it more sellable as a movie property.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
quote:Some people attack the grid in a highly intuitive and random manner. Others use the most refined of logic. I hate it when the random guesser blows my ships out of the water, but statistically, it is bound to happen.
Sometimes logic works against the logical.
This is not an example of logic working against you; it is an example of randomness working against you. If you could show that picking squares at random was a consistently good strategy, you might have something.
Posted by Xavier (Member # 405) on :
quote: Some people attack the grid in a highly intuitive and random manner. Others use the most refined of logic. I hate it when the random guesser blows my ships out of the water, but statistically, it is bound to happen.
Part of that intuition is knowing your opponent's tendencies. Does he try and hide the small ship in the corners? Does he put multiple ships together in hopes that you'll miss the entire area? How often does he use the edges? Are his ships most often vertical or horizontal?
And of course placement of your own ships attempts to minimize your opponent's ability to detect your particular tendencies.
What is your "highly logical" way of picking points? Can you express it in pseudo-code?
Posted by Samprimary (Member # 8561) on :
The most important introductory strategy to remember in battleship is that every ship is at least 2 tiles tall. As such, your exploration is made more efficient by being in a spaced checkerboard pattern (i.e., only search every other square on a line, and stagger this between lines).
There was some debate as to whether you should immediately focus on sinking a ship once you strike a hit, or whether you should just note this position and continue forth on the exploratory pattern. The answer is to focus on sinking the ship immediately, since if you remove the 1x2 boat from the game, the exploratory pattern can then be widened to one in every three tiles on a line.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Incidentally, it appears that the American version is a bit simplified. In Norway we played a version where you fire salvoes of three shots, and you are told whether you hit or missed, but not which of your shots got the hits. So there's a bit more thinking and hypothesis-confirmation to be done.
Posted by Tatiana (Member # 6776) on :
We played it with graph paper and more ships. We had one five-space ship which could be horizontal, vertical, or diagonal across squares. This was the battleship. Then we had 2 four-space ships, 3 three-space ships, 4 two-space ships and 5 one-space ships. I believe they were named Destroyers, Cruisers, PT-boats and Submarines in order of decreasing size. I forget the size of the grid. Perhaps it was 10 x 10 squares. It's actually a pretty boring game, to tell the truth. I'm astonished that anyone would try to make it into a movie, and don't have high hopes that the movie could be very interesting.
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
There's recently been huge simple-games-to-movies push, with Monopoly (to be directed by Ridley Scott, seriously google it), Asteroids, and Battleship. I believe I've also heard Candyland and Ouija Board although I didn't read an official press release for them.
Obviously, none of them are going to stick literally to the game, rather they'll just be a bunch of made up plots that loosely follow the theme of the game and presumably include some iconic moments somehow ("You sunk my battleship!").
Posted by dabbler (Member # 6443) on :
I love the movie, Clue, though I'm disappointed that they're trying to remake it.
Posted by Flaming Toad on a Stick (Member # 9302) on :
I really like single-player battleship. I wish it was more popular.
Posted by Nighthawk (Member # 4176) on :
quote:Originally posted by dabbler: I love the movie, Clue, though I'm disappointed that they're trying to remake it.
Say it isn't so! God... is nothing sacred anymore?
(Yeah, I know the answer to that question. Doesn't stop me from complaining)
quote:...with Monopoly (to be directed by Ridley Scott, seriously google it)...
I really thought you were joking there. But, not only is it true (man, Ridley Scott is BUSY!), but they're referring to it as the "Untitled Monopoly Project".
Posted by Scott R (Member # 567) on :
quote:Ouija board
Already been done-- it was called "Witchboard."
Posted by Raymond Arnold (Member # 11712) on :
You think that fact that something has already been done is going to stop Hollywood in the slightest?
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
quote:Originally posted by dabbler: I love the movie, Clue, though I'm disappointed that they're trying to remake it.
Thirded.
Yeesh.
Posted by Orincoro (Member # 8854) on :
What I don't get is why Battleship, of all games, has been chosen. I mean, aside from the most obvious reasons: it was never patented for one (though I don't know how that affects copyright issues), it has name recognition, and it's about naval battles, and specifically about strategy. I'm obviously just way underestimating the hollywood culture's need for bankability, but this whole thing sounds a whole lot like a script and/or movie pitch that would get tossed around on HBO's Entourage, rather than in "real life."
But still, don't these studios appreciate the mountain of pre-release negative press this is going to generate if it isn't an excellent film? And if it is an excellent film, then can't it just be released as a film, rather than a movie of a pencil and paper game? I'm a bit surprised there haven't been any chess movies (as in, based on the game, not *about* the game). I suppose there's always the slightest chance this movie actually goes the Wizard and or Searching for Bobby Fischer route, but really, what are the chances?
Posted by Blayne Bradley (Member # 8565) on :
They need a movie about Dwarf Fortress.
Posted by TL (Member # 8124) on :
I'm having visions of whole audiences returning to the box office to demand their money back when they realize that all those colored Xs moving around on the screen are the special effects.
Posted by Darth_Mauve (Member # 4709) on :
In the middle of the movie an actor yells "B7" and the seventh seat in row B suddenly explodes. Now that would make it an awesome movie (unless, of course, you were sitting in seat B7).
Posted by Flaming Toad on a Stick (Member # 9302) on :
Eh, I dunno. I can think of very few better ways to die.