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Ultimate Tic Tac Toe

mathwithbaddrawings.com

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Re: Ultimate Tic Tac Toe

#82
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "small" update? I think this is more like the difference between checkers and chess. But yes, relevant xkcd

> I think this is more like the difference between checkers and chess I'm not sure what you mean by this? BTW are you aware that despite it has only one type of stone and simpler rules, checkers is in fact the more complex game, to write an AI for?

I guess you refer to International checkers (being from the Netherlands). Still a challenge for computers, given that the brute-force solution for American checkers doesn't work well for this larger board.

Much harder to program an AI for than chess, certainly. The computer never managed to beat the world champion in a match last year.

Re: Ultimate Tic Tac Toe

#85
post #33
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of whether you can build a perfect AI on commodity hardware, though I haven't played this yet, it promises to be a much more interesting game than the normal tic-tac-toe! Harder to draw a lot on napkins though, but then again, a single game takes much longer.

use 9 napkins - problem solved ;)

if you use napkins then you can also move the boards around ;)

Re: Ultimate Tic Tac Toe

#87

My favorite "mathematician game" is Sprouts: http://nrich.maths.org/2413 First heard about it in a column in Scientific American by A. K. Dewdney. The rules are simple and it is rather fun. In one of his columns he talked about playing a toroidal version where a line going off one edge of a rectangular page comes back in on the opposite side.

There's a World Game of Sprouts Association that organizes a yearly tournament by email. The same Russian dude always wins. http://www.wgosa.org/champions.htm

Re: Ultimate Tic Tac Toe

#88
post #23

I think the Orwin gambit can be extended to win the game every time. - Force opponent to fill center miniboard, as he describes. - Force opponent to fill (e.g.) northeast corner in the same way. Opponent now has taken two miniboards, and you have none, but you are one turn away from taking each of the remaining seven. - Pick SW corner of SW corner. You have taken SW corner miniboard. Opponent is forced to play in sam…

Here's an implementation that pretty much does exactly that. If someone can beat this bot, lemme know: https://www.khanacademy.org/cs/in-tic-tac-toe-ception-perfec...

And here's James Irwin's original implementation, auto-set to a Monte-Carlo AI and with a rules variation that (to my knowledge) prevents Perfect Bot from winning. Play with the config variables at the top for some other AIs and 2-player games and whatnot. https://www.khanacademy.org/cs/in-tic-tac-toe-ception/167633...

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