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No Ifs Or Buts

This repository contains materials for the coding dojo of November 28, 2019.

Battleship

We're going to implement the board game 'Battleship'. It's a two-player game. Each player has a 10x10 grid on which they place their ships:

  • A carrier, which is 5 cells long
  • A battleship: 4 cells
  • A cruiser: 3 cells
  • A submarine: 3 cells
  • A destroyer: 2 cells

The winner of the game is the player who first finds and destroys all their opponent's ships.

First both players set up their boards: they place their ships in such a way that the other player cannot see where. Ships can be oriented horizontally and vertically, not diagonally. It's fine if they lie next to each other, but they cannot overlap of course.

The players take turns guessing. Each guess consists of a column (A-J) and a row (1-10). The response to a guess is either "hit" or "miss", which is marked using a red or white peg, respectively. When all cells of one of your ships are hit, you announce that the ship has sunk and which ship it was.

That was only a brief explanation; for a more complete coverage of the game please head over here. And here's a video for the more visually oriented.

Challenge

Your challenge is to implement the game without using conditional logic. So you cannot use:

  • if statements
  • case/switch statements
  • ternary operator (<cond> ? <when-true> : <when-false>)
  • loops with conditions, e.g. for, while, etc. (so for **element** in myList is OK, but for **index** in 0..9 is not; the point is to make off-by-one errors impossible)
  • try/catch

Whenever you want to use a construct and you're not sure if you're allowed to, you're probably not. The goal is to learn about different ways of thinking, ways that don't require conditions. We're taking it here to the extreme, because then you'll probably learn more. In "real life" we do not recommend doing this, unless you want to annoy your colleagues or your future-self of course.

You can use any programming language / editor / IDE of your choice. As always, please work in pairs and use TDD (yes, really).

Advanced Challenges

When you're finished but not yet done, you can take the game any direction you like. Be creative! Here's a few ideas to help you spark yours:

  • Implement the Salvo variation
  • Implement a remote version so that the players don't have to be at the same location
  • Implement a version with n players instead of just two (Do they all have separate grids? Do the grids overlap, partially or completely? If you have a hit, do you know which player you hit? Etc...)