Turning an Arduino into an invincible Tic-Tac-Toe master is hardly a challenge, but I wrote a sketch for it anyway because I need it for a more ambitious project. For that project, I also had to design a couple of flawed Tic-Tac-Toe strategies with different levels of ‘vincibility’.
Next, I’ll have two Arduinos play matches against each other and analyse the outcome for all combinations of competing strategies. Now the strategies can be ordered based on their success rate.
The final goal is to make the Arduino act as a Tic-Tac-Toe trainer for beginners. While guiding their learning process by letting them play against increasingly better strategies, I can monitor their progression and compare it with the learning process of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN), for which I’m currently writing a sketch. Will 2,000 bytes be able to keep up with 100,000,000,000 human neurons?
This is a work in progress. For now, the video shows the Arduino in invincible mode, with me playing at the level of a befriended nation’s president. I even managed to put myself in a lost position after my very first move. It definitely takes some skills to loose this game…
For centuries, they had been creating all kinds of virtual worlds inside their minds, supported by little more than paper or a blackboard. Mind games, where everything was allowed, as long as you could prove it from self-postulated axioms. The principle of fractals or the concept behind cellular automata, for instance, had already been developed long before their fascinating complexity could be visualized.
My TI-58 has always been ‘my precious’. Its (by modern standards) limited memory size inspired me to design smart algorithms and to write efficient programs.
This shows the battery module before and after the operation. The tape was just a helping hand during surgery that I forgot to remove (happens in hospitals too).
And there she is, my reborn baby, proudly showing her purchase date.