Michael J. Swart

It's learning

Stephen Horne (aka BlueDog67) threw down the challenge last week to Create An Unbeatable Tic-Tac-Toe Game. He did that in this post.

So that’s what I did. Here’s my crack at it (which I also left as a comment):

The curious can download https://michaeljswart.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/tictactoe.zip

The zipped file contains two files:

• One is a bcp output file that contains data. (It is used by the script)
• The other is a sql script that creates the following tables and procedures:
  • TABLE tttBoard (spaceId, value)
  • TABLE tttMoves(id, turn, bestNextMove)
  • PROCEDURE s_CleanBoard()
  • PROCEDURE s_PrintBoard()
  • PROCEDURE s_MakeMove(@spaceId, @letter)
  • PROCEDURE s_ComputerMove

I decided to use a look up table (tttMoves) to find the best move. I thought it fitting to develop a solution that uses a set of data rather than an algorithm because of it is T-SQL after all. Here are three things I learned.

• The size of tttMoves is extremely small. Roughly 4500. Think about it. If you take nine ordered spaces on a tic-tac-toe board and put every combination of X, O, or space, there’s still a manageable number of boards to deal with. I removed completed boards and boards showing games that were invalid. 4500 were left. Of these game boards, only about 400 were more complicated than a simple win or a block for their best move.
• The whole process was a lot quicker than it took the eighties super-computer to learn tic tac toe in WarGames. (Who remembers that? To this day, joshua is a terrible password)
• A T-SQL tip: This should have been obvious but remember that order of columns in a table matters when using BULK INSERT with a data file using native formatting.