Coding Challenge: Battleship... and a personal note

Daniel,

First a personal note: I am impressed and inspired by your videos. From your way to present theory to application it is truely wonderful to see. I enjoy seeing someone reaching people in all walks of life. You are truly a blessing to me and I am sure many others. Thank you for the hard, tedious, tiring work you do. I am an engineering consultant working in facilitation in manufacturing environments - things like leadership, lean manufacturing, and automation. I also code on the side. I study and absorb not just the code but how you communicate. I am big on process and spontaneous creativity is not easy to learn... it is a gift. I know well that can be incredibly taxing - and I appreciate your energetic enthusiasm. Thank you.

Anyway, my request is for a battleship coding challenge. Yes there is the logic piece, some simple visuals, board setup, data structure decisions to hold game data (object based? Matrix based?) and the like.

The twists I propose:

- An AI player mode that has selectable skill levels to play against. Say easy, medium, hard. The accuracy of shots after a first hit detection could go up as you have a harder AI. I was thinking that when a hit is made by the AI, the AI has an area of cells around the hit that it can pick from. The area range of available open spaces to shoot next around the hit increases as AI skill decreases.( Odds of making a successful second shot a hit decrease - more possibilities) Maybe add some logic on not shooting a space when we know the boat availability- if a sub with 3 hit points is left, don't shoot where only 2 spaces ajoin and the 3rd is a miss already.

- A 2 player version where two separate web pages play against each other. Maybe have a way to log into the server, and the server picks players randomly? That may be a stretch... maybe a simple 2 page interaction is the better place to start.

Thanks,

Shawn