Tic-tac-toe Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Tic-tac-toe, also called noughts and crosses and many other names, is a paper and pencil game between two players, O and X, who alternate in marking the spaces in a 3×3 board. A player wins by getting three of their own marks in a horizontal, vertical or diagonal row.This game is won by the first player, X:
This game is drawn:
Players soon discover that best play leads to a draw, regardless of where the first player plays. So 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. This reputation for ease has led to Las Vegas casinos offering gamblers the chance to play tic-tac-toe against trained chickens.
of the game tree for tic-tac-toe.]]The simplicity of tic-tac-toe makes it ideal as a pedagogical tool for teaching the concepts of 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 (the game tree complexity) on this space. Ignoring symmetry, there are 255,168 possible games.
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Variations
Many games share the element of trying to be the first to get n-in-a-row: three men's morris, nine men's morris, pente, gomoku, Connect Four, Quarto. The m,n,k-games are a family of generalized games based on tic-tac-toe.
- 3-dimensional tic-tac-toe on a 3×3×3 board is no fun: the first player has an easy win by playing in the centre. But the game on the 4×4×4 board (called Qubic) is much more subtle. It was solved by Victor Allis in 1994 (the first player can force a win) but is still interesting for humans.
- In misère tic-tac-toe you win if the other player gets n in a row. The 3×3 game is a draw.
- In nine board tic-tac-toe nine tic-tac-toe boards are themselves arranged in a 3×3 grid. The first player's move may go on any board; all moves afterwards are placed in the empty spaces on the board corresponding to the square of the previous move (that is, if a move were in the upper-left square of a board, the next move would take place on the upper-left board). If a player can't move because the indicated board is full, the next move may go on any board. Victory is attained by getting 3 in a row on any board. This makes the game considerably longer and more involved than tic-tac-toe, with a definite opening, middle game and endgame.
- There is a game which is isomorphic to tic-tac-toe, but on the surface appears completely different. Players take it in turn to say a number between one and nine. A particular number may not be repeated. Both players aim to say three numbers which add up to 15. Plotting these numbers on a 3×3 magic square will reveal the exact correspondence with the game of tic-tac-toe, given that three numbers will be arranged in a straight line if and only if they add up to 15.
Alternative names
- Tic-tac-toe, tick-tat-toe, or tit-tat-toe (English - USA)
- Noughts and crosses or naughts and crosses (English - United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia)
- Ta-te-ti (Spanish)
- Tres en raya ("three in a line") (Spanish)
- Gato (Spanish)
- Equis Cero (Spanish)
- Tris (Italian)
- Morpion (French)
- Boter, kaas en eieren ("butter, cheese and eggs") (Dutch)
- Amőba (Hungarian)
- Kryds og bolle (Danish)
- Luffarschack, (literally "tramp chess"), Tripp trapp trull (Swedish)
- Ristinolla (Finnish)
- X şi zero (Romanian)
- Jogo da velha (Portuguese - Brazil)
- Τρίλιζα (Greek)
- Zero kata (Hindi)
- Phool aur chaukadi (Hindi)
- Maru batsu (円伐, "circle strike") (Japanese)
- Sanmoku narabe (三目並べ, "three in a row") (Japanese)
- Морски шах ("sea chess") (Bulgarian)
- Kółko i krzyżyk ("circle and cross") (Polish)
- Bondesjakk ("peasant's chess") (Norwegian)