Portal:Sports/Selected article/June 2008

 Tic-tac-toe is a pencil-and-paper game for two players, O and X, who take turns marking the spaces in a 3&times;3 grid. The player who succeeds in placing three respective marks in a horizontal, vertical or diagonal row wins the game.

Players soon discover that best play from both parties leads to a draw. Hence, tic-tac-toe is most often played by very young children; when they have discovered an unbeatable strategy they move on to more sophisticated games such as dots and boxes.

The simplicity of tic-tac-toe makes it ideal as a pedagogical tool for teaching the concepts of combinatorial game theory and the branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the searching of game trees. It is straightforward to write a computer program to play tic-tac-toe perfectly, to enumerate the 765 essentially different positions (the state space complexity), or the 26,830 possible games up to rotations and reflections (the game tree complexity) on this space.

The first known video game, OXO (or Noughts and Crosses, 1952) for the EDSAC computer played perfect games of tic-tac-toe against a human opponent.

One example of a Tic-Tac-Toe playing computer is the Tinkertoy computer, developed by MIT students, and made out of Tinker Toys. It only plays Tic-Tac-Toe, and has never lost a game. It is currently on display at the Museum of Science, Boston.

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