What is "tic-tac-toe"

alt. (context games English) A game in which two players take turns putting circles and crosses on a 3x3 grid and try to get three of the same symbols in a line n. (context games English) A game in which two players take turns putting circles and crosses on a 3x3 grid and try to get three of the same symbols in a line

n. a game in which two players alternately put crosses and circles in one of the compartments of a 3-by-3 board; the object is to get a row of three crosses or three circles before the opponent does [syn: ticktacktoe, ticktacktoo, tick-tack-toe, tit-tat-toe, noughts and crosses]

Tic-tac-toe (also known as noughts and crosses or Xs and Os) is a paper-and-pencil game for two players, X and O, who take turns marking the spaces in a 3×3 grid. The player who succeeds in placing three of their marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row wins the game.

The following example game is won by the first player, X:

Players soon discover that best play from both parties leads to a draw. Hence, Tic-tac-toe is most often played by young children.

Because of the simplicity of tic-tac-toe, it is often used as a pedagogical tool for teaching the concepts of good sportsmanship and the branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the searching of game trees. It is straightforward to write a computer program to play tic-tac-toe perfectly, to enumerate the 765 essentially different positions (the state space complexity), or the 26,830 possible games up to rotations and reflections (the game tree complexity) on this space.

The game can be generalized to an m,n,k-game in which two players alternate placing stones of their own color on an m×n board, with the goal of getting k of their own color in a row. Tic-tac-toe is the (3,3,3)-game.