Friday, February 27, 2009

Tic Tac Toe - A Deterministic Game


A Deterministic Game

What is a deterministic game?
A deterministic game is a game where the outcome of the game can be determined right from the start of the game. That means, there is a strategy that a player can use to obtain an outcome favourable to him (however it does not always mean he will end up in a win).

In the example of Tic-Tac-Toe:

We can find a strategy for the player who starts first to either win or draw (which means the worst outcome is a draw for him, but he will never lose if he use this strategy).

For many of you, you might know that the strategy is to always placed at the corner, but how do we explain this?

You can draw a game tree to find all the possible game plays between 2 player.

Please view http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tic-Tac-Toe for the first 2 step of the game tree and continue from there.

Or you can view the explanation at

Just for interest, these are the variation of Tic Tac Toe
3D tic tac toe

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