Monthly Archives: May 2018

i played a lot of Tix.Tax on the sly recently. It’s a browser-based multiplayer game that takes the humble game of Tic Tac Toe to a new level. It’s the kind of game you might see playing in an episode of Star Trek alongside Five-Dimensional Chess or Go Upside Down.

In Tix.Tax, you play ten games of Tic Tac Toe at the same time. Each sector of the large 3×3 Tic Tac Toe grid is itself a small set of Tic Tac Toe. Once you win a small game, you take that space in the overall big game. You win the entire game if you win three small games in a row, as required by the laws of Tic Tac Toe.

When you take a seat in one of the tiny grids, the game moves to that area for your opponent’s turn. If I take the space at the top left in the central play, then my opponent takes a space in the top left play.

It is probably easier to show it.

The result is a tactical game of territory management where you try to force your opponent to play little games that are unnecessary for them, so that they have to hopefully give you the blow you want.

Tix.Tax gets complicated quite quickly. Importantly, if you take a space that would move the game to a small game that someone has already won, your opponent can play in any available space they like.

In the clip below, I know blue needs the space at the bottom right of the bottom right minigame to take that area. By taking this space, he claims this match. Since the game should then switch to the lower right game it just claimed, I can actually play anywhere I want. So I use my next move to win. Yay!

Yes, it’s pretty mind-blowing, but I really like it. The game is free and allows you to compete against people or a bot to practice. Fun fact: One of the creators is Jesper the End, one of the brains behind classic Minecraft adventure maps like Diversity.

What game is President Trump playing? By that I mean what’s real Game does he play?

Trump’s political performance, with seriousness and jest, has often been compared to failure. Even at Three-, four-, eight-, ten- and 12 dimensions chess. His supporters argue that he is a great teacher and his detractors argue that he is a patzer. CNN’s Chris Cillizza wrote two different articles accusing Trump of playing “zero dimensional chess,” whatever that means. Even Garry Kasparov, arguably the greatest chess player of all time, weighed in, to rise up against the use of this gaming snapshot via Politico.

In my job here at FiveThirtyEight, I spend a lot of time thinking about games – board games, video games, chess tournaments, math puzzles, international business game theory. So I understand that “playing chess” is an easy shortcut to “playing strategy” or “being smart” or whatever. But I think we can do better. I humbly suggest that Trump does not play chess (of any dimension), but rather something called “ultimate tic-tac-toe”. It’s time to update your tropes.

As fast as I can the rules: The ultimate tic-tac-toe, sometimes called a tic-tac-toe fractal or meta tic-tac-toe or tic-tac-tic-tac-toe-toe, is played on a three-by-three by three-by-three grid. three grids. It looks like this:

Each of the nine small sub-grids is a familiar game of noughts and crosses. Win the small game in one of these sub-grids and you can claim it with a big “X” or “O”, which counts as a square in your favor in the bigger game. Winning the bigger game is yours. ultimate goal – basically you want to win three noughts and crosses in the same column, diagonal, or row.

But here’s the catch: where your opponent moves dictates where you move, and vice versa.

For example, if I start by placing my X in the upper left corner of one of the small grids, then you need to place your next O somewhere in the upper left grid. Your game there then dictates the grid where I should make my next game, and so on.

(You can play the game for yourself here, as built by Vikesh Khanna.)

Playing a few games of the ultimate tic-tac-toe makes you feel in your guts what it’s like to be a keen observer of the past two years of news cycles. (I guess it sounds like this in the White House, too.) The ultimate tic-tac-toe is a superbly orderly distillation of the strategy of distraction, delay, misdirection, procrastination, and improvisation.

It is a game of the past and the present. While chess offers a singular goal – to capture the opponent’s king – the ultimate tic-tac-toe offers fluid and shifting goals. The latest events (Scott Pruitt) may feel very distant from past events that come back to the fore (Stormy Daniels).

The ultimate tic-tac-toe is a game of frustration. Good chess players develop a unique plan and try to bring it to fruition. Ultimate tic-tac-toe players cannot do this. A map (Infrastructure week) can quickly derail (Comey). The next plan (Infrastructure week) can quickly suffer a similar fate (resignation of an assistant).

Ultimate tic-tac-toe is a game of confusion. In chess, there is only one battleground. In the ultimate tic-tac-toe, there are plenty, both local and global. These battlefields interact with each other in strange and complicated ways. The locals, the residents (recurring fights on Twitter) have little immediately obvious relationship to the global relationship (the welfare of the American people).

The bottom line: even a good ultimate tic-tac-toe game seems hit and miss, easy, and even downright silly at first glance. There is no clear or elegant strategy.

None of this tic-tac-toe stuff is meant to lessen the intricacies or intricacies of the current political moment. Chess is known for its complexity, of course – there are more chess sets possible than atoms in the universe and so on. But the ultimate tic-tac-toe is not to be outdone. To obtain a very approximate upper bound of the number of possible games, we can imagine that there are 81 places for the first move, then 80 places for the second, then 79, then 78 and so on. This brings us to the number 81!, that is, approximately 6 followed by 120 zeros. It’s incomprehensibly large (and doesn’t even take into consideration the weird, complicated game game tree). Even computers Wrestle to play it well.

So is Trump playing his game right or wrong? I have no idea. All I really know is: it’s not chess. Please design your holds accordingly.

JERUSALEM: Scientists have developed a robotic system that can play tic tac toe, and that could be used to help stroke survivors improve their performance on real tasks in a fun way.
Researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Israel, designed a game with a robotic arm to simulate “3D functional activities of daily living” – actions people take on a daily basis, such as drinking from a cup, which are often rehabilitated.
Designing a social robot to help rehabilitate a patient is a new field that requires a lot of research and experimentation to determine the optimal conditions.
“Playing Tic Tac Toe with a set of cups (instead of X and O) is an example of a game that can help rehabilitate an upper limb,” said Shelly Levy-Tzedek of BGU.
“A person can pick up and place a lot of cups while enjoying a game and improving their performance in a daily task,” said Levy-Tzedek.
For the study published in the journal Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, researchers compared the motivation of study participants to play with a robot versus a set of computer-controlled LED lights to determine the importance of interacting with it. a real physical robot.
They tested the system on 62 healthy right-handed people in two age groups: 40 young adults around 25 (23 women and 17 men) and 22 people aged around 75 (10 women and 12 men).
Both groups preferred the robotic system to the LED lighting system. Older adults said it looked more like a human, while younger adults said the robot “was more interesting, fun and engaging.”
When asked which partner they would prefer to play two more games with, both groups chose the robotic system over the lights. However, when asked to play 10 more games, the older adults always preferred the robot, but the younger group preferred to play against the LED light system.
“Some of the young adults complained that the robot was moving too slowly; therefore, they preferred the faster system when asked to play a lot more games, ”said Levy-Tzedek.
“This indicates a need to customize the speed of the robot for each participant,” she said.
An unexpected discovery was that the robot’s movement influenced human movement. Young people and older adults moved much slower when playing with the slower robot compared to the faster lighting system.
These results indicate that people are ready to continue interacting with a robotic device in a social type setting, and this embodiment plays an important role, which is a positive sign for the future of such systems.
Now that they have established the feasibility, the researchers recommend testing their system on stroke rehabilitation.