there's been some concern that iran didn't map where it put the mines, which is going to make it hard to find them. that's probably not true; they're probably just refusing to divulge the information. it might also be why they were shooting at people to stay out.

while this may have been a hard problem not too long ago, i don't imagine it would be so hard now. the americans have incredible satellite technology at their disposal. they should be able to write a simple program to find the mines in the satellite data. i don't know why they would send ships out, unless those ships were getting gps co-ordinates from the satellites.

it might be a novel problem.

it shouldn't be a hard one.