Minor flashing lights warning for the encode!
3-D Tic-Tac-Toe is an interesting evolution to the standard Tic-Tac-Toe game. Instead of making three in a row, you make four. But, there's also four grids stacked on top of each other. Now instead of making a line on one board, you can make a line across multiple! This game was then released on the Atari 2600 in 1978, written by Carol Shaw. This TAS aims to beat the hardest of 8 difficulty levels against a CPU.
Objectives
- Uses hardest difficulty
- Emulator: BizHawk 2.11.0 (Stella core)
Notes
Ever since I did my
Level 1 TAS, I've always thought about making a TAS for the hardest difficulty. I didn't know exactly how to go about it though, so I left it alone. Last night, I decided to look up the game online to see if I could find anything that could help with this project. I eventually learned two things:
1) 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe is a partially solved game.
2) Assuming optimal play from both players, the first player can force a win every time.
This reinvigorated my interest in TASing Level 8, and I got to work as soon as I could (I couldn't sleep until 7 in the morning because I was too excited thinking about TASing this). I immediately chose a centre square, as it gives the most options for a four-in-a-row, which gives me an advantage over the CPU. To figure out the rest of the moves, I opened another game of 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe and fed the CPU's moves into itself, and then used the resulting moves in the TAS. Not a very elegant way of solving the problem, but hey, it works! According to the game's manual, the average thinking time for the CPU to do on Level 8 is 20 minutes. Although I'm pretty sure there could be a faster game, I'm quite pleased with the fact that I got it below one minute.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go draw every possible game of 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe by hand, in hopes of having a complete strategy tree. I ran out of blue paper, so I'm just going to paint every surface in my city blue and use that instead. What could possibly go wrong? See ya! - Walgrey
nymx: Claiming for judging.
nymx: Accepting to "Standard" as a new branch of "Level 8".
