![]() ![]() If both players just avoid obvious losing moves, neither loses and the game results in a draw. Tic Tac Toe is firmly in the “strong” category because of its narrow range of options. At the highest level, a solved game actually prescribes the exact moves to make for perfect play, regardless of any prior moves. There are three levels of solved games: ultra-weak, weak and strong. This means that at any point in the game, this “perfect play” solution predicts who will win or lose. In game theory, a game becomes “solved” when someone discovers a strategy for best play that cannot be improved upon. It’s useful for whittling away a few minutes of boredom here and there over the years, but once mastered by both players, the game only ever ends in a draw. Most children learn Tic Tac Toe in primary grades, master it in the early teens, and grow bored with it well before leaving high school. ![]() It might not be the mayfly of games, but it certainly lives in dog years. Like that rhyme, the game of Tic Tac Toe lives mostly in childhood, stretched between the children too young to understand and the ones too old to care. It had been passed almost exclusively from older children to younger ones, who then grew up and taught it to the next level down, all within a span of ages from five to ten years. How had this silly little rhyme managed to endure so well over so vast a distance and time? There were no adults teaching it to children, and it certainly wasn’t in any educational media. This was in Florida, and I had first heard those words about twenty years before, during my own childhood in Washington State. When my oldest child was playing with neighbors at the age of seven, I heard a familiar taunt: “Becky and Joey, sittin’ in a tree….” I’m sure you can finish the rest.
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