How to find a battleship

Consider a “sea” of M squares which contains (at some unknown location) a “battleship” of K squares. Both the sea and the battleship can assume any rectangular shape. Our goal is to find the battleship by probing at least one of its squares. In this paper we describe a deterministic strategy for this problem which is guaranteed to locate the battleship in at most c1M/K probes, where c1 ≈ 3.065.

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