Description

Tic-tac-toe (or Noughts and crosses, Xs andOs)is a pencil-and-paper game for two players, X and O, who taketurnsmarking the spaces in a 3×3 grid. The player who succeeds inplacingthree respective marks in a horizontal, vertical, ordiagonal rowwins the game.

Players soon discover that best play from both parties leads toadraw (often referred to as cat or cat's game). Hence, Tic-tac-toeismost often played by young children.

The friendliness of Tic-tac-toe games makes them ideal asapedagogical tool for teaching the concepts of goodsportsmanshipand the branch of artificial intelligence that dealswith thesearching of game trees.

An early variant of Tic-tac-toe was played in the RomanEmpire,around the first century BC. It was called Terni Lapilliandinstead of having any number of pieces, each player only hadthree,thus they had to move them around to empty spaces to keepplaying.The game's grid markings have been found chalked all overRome.However, according to Claudia Zaslavsky's book Tic Tac Toe:AndOther Three-In-A Row Games from Ancient Egypt to theModernComputer, Tic-tac-toe could originate back to ancientEgypt.Another closely related ancient game is Three Men's Morriswhich isalso played on a simple grid and requires three pieces in arow tofinish.

The different names of the game are more recent. The firstprintreference to "Noughts and crosses", the British name, appearedin1864. The first print reference to a game called"tick-tack-toe"occurred in 1884, but referred to "a children's gameplayed on aslate, consisting in trying with the eyes shut to bringthe pencildown on one of the numbers of a set, the number hit beingscored"."Tic-tac-toe" may also derive from "tick-tack", the name ofan oldversion of backgammon first described in 1558.

-Source: WIKIPEDIA

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