Tic Tac Toe

# If neither player makes a mistake, the game is drawn (but we knew that already).

# This is an exercise in examining the objective properties of a game. There are two interesting sides to this:

# 1) The objective properties of Tic Tac Toe really matter for our enjoyment of it: It is a boring game because there are so relatively few combinations.

# 2) On the other hand, humans clearly play the game in a different way than the computer. The computer’s playing style lets us make some observations about how humans play games.

# To the computer, the first move is the most complicated (takes around a second on my 2ghz machine). This is unlike human players who seldomly have any problem deciding what to do on the first move.

# The program assumes that the opponent does not make any mistakes. Humans do make mistakes, of course, so in actuality the program isn’t playing optimally. —Jesper Juul —Tic Tac Toe (Half-Real)

From the website for Juul’s new book. Looks good.