tic-tac-toe

13 Articles

A PCB business card with a built-in 4x4 tic-tac-toe game on the back.

2024 Business Card Contest: A Game For Two

May 30, 2024 by 2 Comments

If you want to make a good first impression on someone, it seems like the longer you can keep them talking, the better. After all, if they want to keep talking, that’s a pretty good sign that even if you don’t become business partners, you might end up friends. What better way to make an acquaintance than over a friendly game of tic-tac-toe?

This one will probably take them by surprise, being a 4×4 matrix rather than the usual 3×3, but that just makes it more interesting. The front of the card has all the usual details, and the back is a field of LEDs and micro switches. Instead of using X and O, [Edison Science Corner] is using colors — green for player one, and red for player two. Since playing requires the taking of turns, the microcontroller lights up green and red with alternating single-button presses.

Speaking of, the brains of this operation is an ATMega328P-AU programmed with Arduino. If you’d like to make your own tic-tac-toe business card, the schematic, BOM, and code are all available. Be sure to check out the build and demo video after the break.

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FPGA Plays Tic-Tac-Toe

June 24, 2023 by 18 Comments

As computers get more and more powerful and artificial intelligence algorithms improve, few games remain where the best humans can reliably beat their electronic counterparts. In chess this barrier was passed in 2005 with the last human win against a computer, and recently humans lost to computers at go. Simpler games like tic-tac-toe have been solved for all possible positions for a while now, so even a simple computer will always win or tie the game. But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing left to learn about these games as [Hayden] demonstrates with this tic-tac-toe game built entirely on an FPGA.

[Hayden] is making this as part of a college course on digital design, so it really starts at first principles for working with FPGAs. It’s programmed in Verilog on a Basys 3 board, which also hosts the switches used as the game’s input and handles the VGA video output as well. The build uses state machines to keep track of the moves played on each of the squares, and another state machine to keep track of whether or not the current game has been won. If so, it highlights the winning moves in red, and stops taking further inputs until it is reset. Some more logic ties everything together along with a customized VGA driver to produce the entire gaming experience.

A game like tic-tac-toe is a great way to master the fundamentals of a system like this before moving on to more complex programs, especially on an FPGA platform that might handle a lot of the things we take for granted on more traditional computing systems, such as the video output. If you’re interested in taking more of a deep dive into the world of FPGAs, we published a primer about them a few years ago that will get you started.

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Logic Via DNA

November 17, 2022 by 8 Comments

We often say you can make logic gates out of nearly anything. [Steve Mould] would agree as he just finished playing naughts and crosses (tic tac toe if you are an American) with a tray full of DNA. You can see the resulting game and how it works in the video below.

The use of DNA isn’t really significant as it simply implements a logic equation for each of the nine cells. So, for example, each cell is taken by an X (the DNA) only when certain other squares have been taken by O or not taken by O. So you essentially create an AND/OR gate using the state of each cell and its inverse.

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A Robot Game To Open Your Hackerspace

March 25, 2022 by 1 Comment

It’s always good to welcome a new hackerspace to the fold, and thus we’re pleased to hear about the upcoming opening of Hackerspace Drenthe, on the north-eastern edge of the Netherlands. Starting a new space during a global pandemic is something of a feat. As part of their opening something is required to demonstrate a robot for the curious public, and what could be more accessible than a robot arm playing tic-tac-toe!

It would be correct to say that a robot moving blocks with precision is not necessarily a ground-breaking achievement, but in its purpose of providing eye-candy for a hackerspace opening while also serving as an experiment for some of the students from the school adjacent to the space it is a success. The interface is a pleasingly retro War Games style terminal, and the software is written in Python. For the curious all can be found on a GitHub repository, and should you be in that region of Europe you can find Hackerspace Drenthe in the Netherlands border town of Coevorden and attend their opening on the 2nd of April.

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A robot playing tic-tac-toe against a human

TICO Robot Plays Tic-Tac-Toe By Drawing On A Tiny Whiteboard

September 27, 2021 by 3 Comments

Tic-tac-toe (or “Noughts and Crosses”) is a game simple enough to implement in any computer system: indeed it’s often used in beginner’s programming courses. A more challenging project, and arguably more interesting and useful, is to make some kind of hardware that can play it in real life. [mircemk] built a simple yet elegant machine that can play tic-tac-toe against a human player in a way that looks quite similar to the way humans play against one another: by drawing.

The robot’s design and programming were developed at PlayRobotics, who named the project TICO. The mechanical parts are available as STL files, to be printed by any 3D printer, and a comprehensive manual explains how to assemble and program the whole thing. Since it’s all open source, anyone can build it from scratch and modify it to their liking. The pictures show the original design by PlayRobotics, while the video (embedded after the break) shows [mircemk]’s version, which includes a wooden frame that gives it a bit more presence.

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TOBOT Is Your Tic Tac Toe Opponent With A Bad Attitude

September 16, 2020 by 4 Comments

[3dprintedlife] is apparently a little bored. Instead of whiling away the time playing tic tac toe, he built an impressive tic tac toe robot named TOBOT. The robot uses a Rasberry Pi Zero and a Feather to control a two-axis robot arm that can draw the board and make moves using a pen. It also uses a simple computer vision system to look at the board to understand your move, and it has a voice too.

The other thing TOBOT has is a bad attitude. The robot wants to win. Badly. Check out the video below and you’ll see what we mean.

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Tic-Tac-Toe Implemented In Single Call To Printf()

June 5, 2020 by 34 Comments

[Nicholas Carlini] programmed a C implementation of two-player Tic Tac Toe, and he did it in a single call to printf(). The arguments for that single function call get mind-bendingly complex, so it may come as no surprise that it was written for The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC).

Most of us are aware that printf() is one of those functions that is considerably more complex under the hood, and capable of far more, than it may appear to be. But did you know that it is capable of Turing-complete computation?

[Nicholas] clearly steps through the theory, so give it a read. In short, a maze of arguments handles the logic of the game while an embedded scanf() reads user input, and printing the game board is always preceded by an escape code to clear the screen.

[Nicholas] is certainly no stranger to in-depth understandings; we’ve seen his work before in demonstrating how to fool speech recognition with hidden commands, including a powerful example showing how two virtually identical-sounding audio files transcribe entirely differently.