Tic-tac-toe (American English), noughts and crosses (Commonwealth English), or Xs and Os (Canadian or Irish English) is a paper-and-pencil game for two players who take turns marking the spaces in a three-by-three grid, one with Xs and the other with Os. A player wins when they mark all three spaces of a row, column, or diagonal of the grid, whereupon they traditionally draw a line through those three marks to indicate the win. It is a solved game, with a forced draw assuming best play from both players.
Names In American English, the game is known as "tic-tac-toe". It may also be spelled "tick-tack-toe", "tick-tat-toe", or "tit-tat-toe". In Commonwealth English (particularly British, South African, Indian, Australian, and New Zealand English), the game is known as "noughts and crosses", alternatively spelled "naughts and crosses". This name derives from the shape of the marks in the game (i.e the X and O); "nought" is another name for the number zero, while "cross" refers to the X shape. Sometimes, tic-tac-toe (where players keep adding "pieces") and three men's morris (where pieces start to move after a certain number have been placed) are confused with each other.
Gameplay Tic-tac-toe is played on a three-by-three grid by two players, who alternately place the marks X and O in one of the nine spaces in the grid. In the following example, the first player (X) wins the game in seven steps:
There is no universally agreed rule as to who plays first, but in this article the convention that X plays first is used. Players soon discover that the best play from both parties leads to a draw. Hence, tic-tac-toe is often played by young children who may not have discovered the optimal strategy. 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, most notably the minimax algorithm. It is straightforward to write a computer program to play tic-tac-toe perfectly or 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. If played optimally by both players, the game always ends in a draw, making tic-tac-toe a futile game.
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-by-n board with the goal of getting k of their own color in a row. Tic-tac-toe is the 3,3,3-game. Harary's generalized tic-tac-toe is an even broader generalization of tic-tac-toe. It can also be generalized as an nd game, specifically one in which n = 3 and d = 2. It can be generalised even further by playing on an arbitrary incidence structure, where rows are lines and cells are points. Tic-tac-toe's incidence structure consists of nine points, three horizontal lines, three vertical lines, and two diagonal lines, with each line consisting of at least three points.
History Games played on three-in-a-row boards can be traced back to ancient Egypt, where such game boards have been found on roofing tiles dating from around 1300 BC. An early variation of tic-tac-toe was played in the Roman Empire, around the first century BC. It was called terni lapilli (three pebbles at a time) and instead of having any number of pieces, each player had only three; thus, they had to move them around to empty spaces to keep playing. The game's grid markings have been found chalked all over Rome. Another closely related ancient game is three men's morris which is also played on a simple grid and requires three pieces in a row to finish, and Picaria, a game of the Puebloans. The different names of the game are more recent. The first print reference to "noughts and crosses" (nought being an alternative word for 'zero'), the British name, appeared in 1858, in an issue of Notes and Queries. The first print reference to a game called "tick-tack-toe" occurred in 1884, but referred to "a children's game played on a slate, consisting of trying with the eyes shut to bring the pencil down on one of the numbers of a set, the number hit being scored". "Tic-tac-toe" may also derive from "tick-tack", the name of an old version of backgammon first described in 1558. The US renaming of "noughts and crosses" to "tic-tac-toe" occurred in the 20th century. In 1952, OXO (or Noughts and Crosses), developed by British computer scientist Sandy Douglas for the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge, became one of the first known video games. The computer player could play perfect games of tic-tac-toe against a human opponent. In 1975, tic-tac-toe was also used by MIT students to demonstrate the computational power of Tinkertoy elements. The Tinkertoy computer, made out of (almost) only Tinkertoys, is able to play tic-tac-toe perfectly. It is currently on display at the Computer History Museum. With the advent of the internet, the game transitioned into a staple of casual digital entertainment. In 2016, Google integrated a playable version directly into its search engine results pages, while standalone adaptations achieved high download volumes on mobile platforms like iOS and Android. It also remained a fixture on casual browser-based gaming portals like Kongregate and CrazyGames, where the game is frequently utilized as an entry-level template for teaching multiplayer web design and logic simulations.
Combinatorics When considering only the state of the board, and after taking into account board symmetries (i.e. rotations and reflections), there are only 138 terminal board positions. A combinatorics study of the game shows that when "X" makes the first move every time, the game outcomes are as follows:
91 distinct positions are won by (X) 44 distinct positions are won by (O) 3 distinct positions are drawn (often called a "cat's game")
Strategy
A player can play a perfect game of tic-tac-toe (to win or at least draw) if, each time it is their turn to play, they choose the first available move from the following list, as used in Newell and Simon's 1972 tic-tac-toe program.
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