About the Book
Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 53. Chapters: Mathematical game, Hex, Tic-tac-toe, Solved game, Sprouts, Pentomino, Phutball, Nim, Dots and Boxes, Tangloids, TacTix, Shannon switching game, 24 Game, Racetrack, Four fours, List of mathematicians who studied chess, Ghost Leg, Octal game, Mixmath, Conway's Soldiers, Domineering, Chomp, Map-coloring games, Graph pebbling, Penney's game, Krypto, God's algorithm, Hackenbush, Kayles, Planarity, Cram, Magic gopher, Ponte del Diavolo, Strategy-stealing argument, Spoof, Subtract a square, Greedy Nim, Hexapawn, Wythoff's game, SOS, Toads and Frogs, Grundy's game, 13th root, Sylver coinage, Sim, Dodgem, Black Path Game, Icosian game, Supermind, Cayley's mousetrap, Calculatrivia, First player win. Excerpt: Tic-tac-toe, also called wick wack woe (in some Asian countries) and noughts and crosses (in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and the rest of the British Commonwealth countries), is a pencil-and-paper game for two players, X and O, who take turns marking the spaces in a 3x3 grid. The X player usually goes first. The player who succeeds in placing three respective marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row wins the game. The following example game is won by the first player, X: Players soon discover that best play from both parties leads to a draw. Hence, tic-tac-toe is most often played by young children. The first two plies of the game tree for tic-tac-toeThe friendliness of tic-tac-toe games makes them ideal as a pedagogical tool for teaching the concepts of good sportsmanship 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 tr...
