Tuning was absolutely necessary as 17 algorithms scored under 39 shots at the end (around 70 players took part over all). My algorithm attained 38.19 shots, with the closest competitor finishing at 38.33.
The final competition was a public event (a big thank you goes to the kind folks at Cubido), and many contestants dropped by at the Cubido Headquarters and watched the progress on a large scoreboard (which was also available online). The battle lasted nearly four hours. 10,000 games had been played eventually (each algorithm was required to finish 10,000 identical battlefields). With results so close this large number of games was a must to avoid any "accidental winner", a winner that would have benefited by certain random distributions (as a matter of fact during the preliminary rounds, which only consisted of 50 games each, my implementation scored at between 34.5 and 40.5 shots, so that's quite a spread - a spread that was caused both by the random distribution of ships on the battlefield, as well as the algorithm's internal randomizer, which is applied when choices are evaluated as being equal otherwise).
As I have promised before, I am going to talk about the ideas behind the algorithm and post the complete sourcecode over the next few days.