Funny things: there are 4578 valid boards. Of those, 16 are draw positions, and ... | Hacker News

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		p4bl0 on Nov 14, 2023 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Implementing Tic Tac Toe with 170mb of HTML – No J... Funny things: there are 4578 valid boards. Of those, 16 are draw positions, and 942 are winning positions. Among the winning positions, 626 are winning position for the player who starts, and 316 for the second player.

deaddodo on Nov 15, 2023 [–]

The only way to win tic-tac-toe consistently is with a double gambit (which the starting player gets an advantage on). E.G. something like:

  X_X
  _O_
  X_O

Problem is, as soon as the other player knows this, every game will end in a draw as they will play to block versus win.

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