Talk to me about Battleship… your job could depend on it!
The classic game “Battleship” has captivated military sailors and civilians alike for at least 100 years as players attempt to hone in on a strategy to destroy their opponent’s ships placed on a game board while avoiding detection and certain destruction of their own ships. The game became one of the earliest home computer programs when it was released on the Z80 Compucolor back in 1979, according to Wikipedia’s sources. And for more than 35 years since, it has been a concept one could use to test someone’s knowledge of programming a system in an elegant way. Recently, I sat in with a colleague of mine while he interviewed a prospective employee. The idea of using Battleship as the pseudo-coding exercise came to him while he was surfing articles on the Internet regarding good thought exercises to engage interviewees. We work for a company where object-oriented programming is the flavor of choice, and so we were interested in how our prospie would arrange the...