yash9460 / tic-tac-toe

A game by using C programming

Tic-Tac-Toe

A game by using C programming and Python

WHAT IS TIC TAC TOE?

• Tic-tac-toe is not a very challenging game for humanbeings. If you’re an enthusiast, you’ve probably movedfrom the basic game to some variant like threedimensional tic-tac-toe on a larger grid. If you sit downright now to play ordinary three-by-three tic-tac-toe witha friend, what will probably happen is that every gamewill come out a tie. Both you and your friend canprobably play perfectly, never making a mistake thatwould allow your opponent to win. But can you describehow you know where to move each turn? Most of thetime, you probably aren’t even aware of alternativepossibilities; you just look at the board and instantly knowwhere you want to move. That kind of instant knowledgeis great for human beings, because it makes you a fastplayer. But it isn’t much help in writing a computerprogram. For that, you have to know very explicitly whatyour strategy is.

Strategy/Algorithm Used in Coding

• The highest-priority and the lowest-priority rules seemedobvious to me right away.The highest-priority are these:

1. If I can win on this move,do it.
2. If the other player can win on the next move,block that winning square.Here are the lowest-priority rules, used only if there isnothing suggested more strongly by the board position:n-2. Take the center square if it’s free. n-1. Take a corner square if one is free.n. Take whatever is available. The highest priority rules are the ones dealing with themost urgent situations: either me or my opponent can win onthe next move. The lowest priority ones deal with the leasturgent situations, in which there is nothing special aboutthe moves already made to guide me. What was harder was to find the rules in between. I knew that the goal of my own tic-tac-toe strategy was to set up a fork, a board position in which I have two winning moves, so my opponent can only block one of them.