Saturday Morning Gaming: Tic Tac Toe Theory
I had the opportunity to play tic-tac-toe with a little kid over the last week. This is a game that I probably haven’t played since I was in the ballpark of how old she is but it was interesting to go back and look at it again as a grownup.
There are only three opening moves. The middle, the corner, and the edge.
So if you go in the middle and your opponent has only two possible moves: the corner or the edge. If you take a corner or an edge as your first move, there are five potential moves that can be taken as a second move which means that this is a game with only 12 potential starts.
That’s a small number! Which makes it a perfect game for kids. When they just get started, it’s about trying to win and, after a mere couple dozen games, it’s about how every game ends up in a tie if you know what you’re doing. (CONTROL THE CENTER.)
So, as we played, we talked about the various moves you could make and how you want to make a triangle and we talked about how most of our games ended in a tie. So I did what I could to play with the game.
The old standby that looks like this (she was Xs, I was Os):
She’d never had someone pull that move on her before. Even as she explained to me that I was cheating and therefore lost the game, I saw a glint in her eyes that said “I’m going to pull this one on Grandpa.” We played some more (she had a high tolerance for tic-tac-toe) and I pulled the old “two grids at once” move and insisted that we play on two grids at once. She ran with it and we had fun jumping between the two grids.
I had spent a lot of time thinking about tic-tac-toe as a game and how, as games go, it’s kind of a crappy one to thinking about how tic-tac-toe is an amazing game for little kids to master stuff like opening moves and really, really, really bad 2nd moves and having all of the information that a game is going to give you.
I recommend that everyone sit down and play a game of tic-tac-toe with a little kid. It’ll teach you stuff about modern games.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is “One of the Oldest Tricks in the Book”, drawn by the author in Microsoft Paint.)
My go-to time waster while waiting for something to happen has been, for decades now, FreeCell solitaire. Enough so that long ago, when I discovered there was no free version for MacOS that wasn’t ugly to look at, I used it as an excuse to write my first program in Python. It’s slowly grown over the years, so it can do things like the classic Microsoft first 32,000 shuffles.
At some point you realize that it’s a sorting puzzle, and there are only about a half-dozen “strategies” to work with. To keep it interesting, there are some layouts that are solvable but take a lot of work, and a handful of games that aren’t solvable at all. And then you discover that there’s a whole academic literature about it, and it was chosen as one of the early challenge problems for AI scheduling/planning competitions.Report
Number the grid like a book,
1,2,3
4,5,6
7,8,9
Now you can play in your head in the car.
Oh, and my normal opening is #7Report
It seems more bad than good to me. Young kids hate it when they sense something is rigged against them. So you get the angry “why am I always losing when I go second” then the “wait, this is actually crooked”.Report