Tic-tac-toe also has another spelling that’s tick tack toe. Sometimes its also known noughts and crosses, X’s and O’s, and many other names. The game is based on pencil-and-paper to be played by two players, O and X, who take turns to mark the 3×3 grid in the empty spaces. The player should able to place three respective marks to win the game; this has to be in a horizontal, vertical or diagonal row.

Players soon found that best play from both parties leads to a draw. Hence, tic-tac-toe is most often proffered by young children; when they don’t find a good enough strategy they move on to more refined games such as chess or chinese checkers. This status for simplicity has led to casinos offering gamblers the chance to play tic-tac-toe against trained chickens.

The plainness of tic-tac-toe makes it perfect as an educational tool for coaching the concepts of combinatorial game theory and the stem of artificial cleverness that deals with the searching of game trees. It is simple to write a computer program to play tic-tac-toe perfectly, to enumerate the 765 essentially unlike places (the state space complexity), or the 26,830 probable games up to rotations and reflections (the game tree complexity) on this space.

One case of a Tic-Tac-Toe playing computer is the Tinkertoy computer, developed by MIT students, and made out of Tinker Toys. It only plays Tic-Tac-Toe and has always won the game. It is at present on display at the Museum of Science, Boston.

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