Explosives on Board Battleships

Battleships as Decision Problem

We define the well-known puzzle of Battleships as a decision problem and prove it to be NPcomplete, by means of a parsimonious reduction. By applying Valiant and Vazirani’s (1986) result we immediately obtain that the variant of this problem, viz. promising that there is a unique solution, is NP-complete as well, under randomized reductions. As this finding is in sheer contrast with the general...

Constraint Programming Models for Solitaire Battleships

The Solitaire Battleships puzzle is described, and a range of constraint programming models are presented. The aim in building these models was to solve difficult instances of the puzzle from CSPLib, without resorting to searching for the solution. These are instances that existing rule-based software for Solitaire Battleships, Fathom It!, cannot solve. The puzzle is quite a challenge to model ...

On-board Data Mining

Networks of remote sensors are becoming more common as technology improves and costs decline. In the past, a remote sensor was usually a device that collected data to be retrieved at a later time by some other mechanism. This collected data were usually processed well after the fact at a computer greatly removed from the in situ sensing location. This has begun to change as sensor technology, o...

Geophones on a board

We examined the feasibility of using seismic reflections to image the upper 10 m of the earth’s subsurface quickly and effectively by attaching geophones to a wooden board at 5-cm intervals. The shallow-seismic-reflection information obtained was equivalent to control-test data gathered using classic, single-geophone plants with identical 5-cm intervals. The results were surprising: We found li...

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