oxo3d

Oxo3d

This is a suite of Go programs for playing and testing 3D noughts and crosses / tic tac toe.

Try Oxo3d online.

Or try it in your terminal in old school ASCII:

go get -u github.com/ncw/oxo3d
oxo3d

+-------------+-------------+
| .  .  .  .  |  0  1  2  3 |
| .  .  .  .  |  4  5  6  7 |
| .  .  .  .  |  8  9 10 11 |
| .  .  .  .  | 12 13 14 15 |
+-------------+-------------+
| .  .  .  .  | 16 17 18 19 |
| .  .  .  .  | 20 21 22 23 |
| .  .  .  .  | 24 25 26 27 |
| .  .  .  X* | 28 29 30 31 |
+-------------+-------------+
| .  .  .  .  | 32 33 34 35 |
| .  .  .  .  | 36 37 38 39 |
| .  .  .  .  | 40 41 42 43 |
| .  .  .  .  | 44 45 46 47 |
+-------------+-------------+
| .  .  .  .  | 48 49 50 51 |
| .  .  .  .  | 52 53 54 55 |
| .  .  .  .  | 56 57 58 59 |
| .  .  .  .  | 60 61 62 63 |
Go (0..63) 

Or try Oxo3d on your Android device. The Go code here is a port of the Java code used in this game.

Playing the game

Oxo 3D is a 3 dimensional (4x4x4) noughts-and-crosses / tic-tac-toe game. This is a game with considerably more strategy than the traditional 3x3 version.

You're O and you have to get 4 in a row. The board is a cube viewed in slices. Imagine the 4 slices piled on top of each other.

Watch out for tricky diagonal lines!

Good luck!

How to play 3D Noughts-and-Crosses

Each group of 4x4 positions represents one plane on the cube.

On each layer there are 10 possible winning lines, 4 horizontal, 4 vertical and two diagonal.

However lines may run from layer to layer also.

There are 76 lines in total possible, these are 4x4 = north-south lines, 16 east-west lines, 16 vertical lines, 2x4x3 = 24 diagonal lines from one edge to another, and 4 diagonal ines from corner to corner.

Levels

There are 6 carefully graduated levels with interesting names.

The levels get increasingly hard. Easy and Simple use the same simple heuristic player, but Easy makes random mistakes. Sneaky uses a two level lookahead player. It is called Sneaky for good reason as you'll see when you play it. Relentless plays very slightly better than Sneaky but with a completely different style. Hard is exactly that and Very Hard plays so well that I haven't beaten it yet.

If you play 2,500 rounds of each one against the other this is what the scores look like. A Random player is included too as a control. There are some interesting reversals of form in the table

...and here is the league table summary of the above

Interestingly the Heuristic1 player beats the Heuristic2 player overall, however you'll see in the detailed breakdown that the Heuristic2 player beats the Heuristic1 player.

History

• Converted to Web with Gopherjs (2018)
• Converted to Go (2013)
• Converted to Java on Android (2010)
• Converted to Python (2004)
• Converted to Perl (2000)
• Converted to C (1996)
• Converted to Psion 3a OPL (1994)
• Converted to BBC Basic (1985)
• Converted to QL BASIC(1985)
• Writen in ZX81 BASIC (1983)
• 35 Years in the Making!

I used to play this game with my father when I was a boy. We always used to play on squared paper while sitting round the kitchen table. When I was old enough (and the home computer had been invented) this inspired me to write a computer player for the game.

The very first version of this game was written in 1983 on a Sinclair ZX81 in BASIC. It used to take 60 seconds to think of a move, and it used to beat the author nearly all of the time. It used the Heuristic1 player. However computing has moved on, and the current version plays at a much higher strength almost instantly. The author has improved too!

Contacting the Author

If you have a problem with Oxo 3D, it goes wrong in some fashion then file an issue. If you just want to say hello then you'll find my email address below!

Nick Craig-Wood [email protected]