# Nine-board Tic Tac Toe

Bruce Ediger June, 2013
Strength: | Predict computer wins.
X |  | O
| O |
O |  |
X |  |
O |  |
|  | X
X |  |
|  | ### Rules Nine-board tic-tac-toe is a tic tac toe variant where nine ordinary, 3-by-3 tic-tac-toe boards make up a 3-by-3 array. Players take turns making marks (human 'X', computer 'O') in the ordinary tic-tac-toe boards. The first mark can appear anywhere. Each subsequent mark gets made in any un-marked spot in the ordinary board that corresponds to the spot where the previous mark got made. The usual 3-in-a-row arrangement of marks in any of the 9 ordinary boards wins. ### Design Nine-board tic-tac-toe runs entirely in your browser. It's an all-JavaScript program. Reset is done by JavaScript, the "reset" or "new game" button will not retrieve the HTML and JavaScript again. This program uses a stock alpha-beta minimax algorithm. It does calculate the utility function incrementally, rather than doing the entire calculation at each terminal node in the game tree. ### Configuration A strength of 4 will handily defeat humans who have never played Nine-board before, and most who have. A stregth of 6 causes firefox to complain about slow scripts. Your machine might be faster. A strength of 0 causes the program to use the static utility function only - no mini-maxing happens. This is pretty easy to beat as it don't look ahead even 1 move to see who might win. You probably want to use even values for strength: odd numbers look one move ahead for how the computer assumes the human will move, and causes goofy results. ### Download and Install Doing a "view source" or "save file" or a command like `wget http://stratigery.com/gen9.html` should get you a copy of the source code. It's a single file, no images or extra JavaScript files. Putting `gen9.html` in your `DocumentRoot` directory should allow you to place a relaxing game of Nine-Board-Tic-Tac-Toe from your own personal server. I encourage you to do this.

Move took 0sec

### computer won