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Comment by mysterydip | Hacker News Reader

One thing I learned only recently was the Romans had a version of tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses, Xs and Os, etc) that is (IMHO) superior to the modern version.

While any capable player will always draw in the modern version, the ancient one gives each player only three pieces. To place a new one, an old must be removed. On the surface at least, this seems to result in a much more strategic game.

I wonder why the modern variant is the one that is most well known?

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We had to do something similar for our Intro to CS course at Tufts years ago: implement both a tic-tac-toe game and an algorithm that would play optimally. Second stage of the project was that, after a player's third move, the oldest "X" or "O" would disappear each turn. I have no idea if they still use that project, but the feeling when your computer player started working and you couldn't beat it was like nothing else, and was one of the reasons I went into CS rather than Economics.

I also had to implement a Tic Tac Toe "AI" when I was in college about a decade ago. Last year I was revisiting my college files backup and decided to upload it into GitHub:

- https://github.com/TCGV/TicTacToe.

The AI player was implemented using the Minimax algorithm, and can never be beaten ;)

Sorry very tangential.

One time I wrote something like this, and shared on reddit. Like you, I used minimax to solve tic tac toe. My comment was downvoted to oblivion and one highly upvoted person wrote:

> You don't need "AI" to solve tic tac toe, it's a solved problem!

Damn...

Even though it truly is a solved problem, it's much more intuitive (and fun) to implement a tic-tac-toe solver from scratch using minimax than any lookup tables heuristic.

Since it is a generic solution, I believe the minimax solver can also be easily modified to implement an "AI" player for that Roman version of the game as well, where pieces are removed.

By the way, using minimax was also one of that college task requirements!

And here's a picture of the solution. https://xkcd.com/832/

Could fit on a sheet of paper indeed.

Someone actually implemented a tic-tac-toe player in Reddit comments using character graphics and cross-comment links.

Brings back memories. I think implementing an AI for tic-tac-toe was one of my first complete implementations of a RL algorithm; circa 2008, I think :)

My guess is it was played on paper. Pens were the dominant writing utensil. Hard to remove and repeat on the same surface.

Even with pencils, erasing leaves a mark and doing so repeatedly will either become too hard to tell or rip through the paper.

The Romans didn't have paper, and pencils were invented in the 16th Century. I think they had chalk, but they almost certainly would have used playing pieces on a board.

My response is why the modern one is not the Roman variant

Standard Roman equipment for temporary writing was a slab of wax (in a supportive folder of some type) and a stylus.

> I wonder why the modern variant is the one that is most well known?

Cause it is the one you teach small kids when they are bored and you have nothing except pen and paper at hand.

They don't know optimal strategy yet. And it is fun when they finally find it out.

Seems like a materialistic evolution. If you're using pieces, picking them up and moving them seems natural. If you're writing it down, it's not as intuitive to erase and rewrite.

One thing that I've learned over the years playing modern board games is that the vast majority of the population is too intellectually lazy to bother learning new games. They'd rather keep playing their (outdated) classics that they know than learn new and better-designed games.

This is largely because they're looking for a social activity first and foremost, and don't much care about the particular rules.

A lot of these people that "don't want to learn something new" will learn that new thing if enough of their friends/family are interested.

Many people are deeply afraid of or do not enjoy losing competitive games. Further, they may also fairly associate the effort of learning a new game with an experienced player a prelude to losing. So their behavior could be fairly seen as 'pain avoidance' or 'enjoyment optimization'. Few people are motivated by intellectual stimulation or curiosity beyond childhood years.

The blame lies largely with the experienced players for failing to give sufficient handicap. If you're teaching somebody how to play Go, start with a 9x9 board and give them 5 stones. If you're teaching Arimaa, give them something like four rabbits, one horse, the camel, and the elephant. Dial back the handicap whenever they win a game, which at those starting handicaps should be from the very beginning.

A player who is just starting go won't even win with 5 stones on 9x9 for a while, but this is still good advice.

I'm always fascinated by people who not only stick to the same basic, boring classics, but they've adopted "house rules" of some sort over the years that they INSIST on playing by, because "that's what they're used to." And then they know how to cheat using the house rules they've come up with, and all their creative efforts become focused entirely on cheating the dumb, inconsistent rules, rather than any actual sense of tactical strategy.

It's like, come on! If you used the same creativity for coming up with real game strategy that you use to trick the other humans in the room and skirt the rules, you'd be really, honestly, good at this game. But people are unwilling to put that kind of direct accountability on themselves, for fear of failure I suppose.

They win and rule by dictacting the world their own rules. Clever they are. Why risk a loss to anothers rules when you can win by enforcing your own rules on them?

As somebody who has played a lot of different board games with a lot of different random people, its a huge time investment to learn a game, especially a complex one, that you might only end up playing one time.

I'm not only talking about complex games. Even something like Azul, which takes 5-8 minutes to teach and 45 minutes to play is met with reluctance from non-initiated people.

I don't expect any non-gamer to sit through a 40-minute explanation, obviously. However, I wouldn't call an hour-long game (including teach) a "huge time investment".

45 minutes of board game I likely won't like is a lot. In any case, games popular among causual players (including me) tend to be much shorter.

Plus, no game that claims 45 in box or even take that long with experienced players ever take 45 min first time. It is usually double the claimed time.

...and they also often delegate boardgames to "child's play". Having done that, they pre-emptively dismiss new board games because they're - by definition - for kids.

By whose definition? There are more board games labelled 14+ releasing every year than there ever was

Monopoly! Woo!!

Met the US chamption of Monopoly in LA at a boardgame meetup in 2010. I asked him how he found enough interest in the game to continue playing to such a level, since it was so shallow/predictable. He replied immediately that Monopoly was really just about convincing people to give you what you want. Turns out he was a lawyer.

Monotony? ... for some reason I never had a problem playing Risk in college even though it would last all night (or more). Playing a six-hour game of Monopoly was only fun for the first couple of hours.

Monopoly should rarely, if ever, last more than 45 minutes. Assuming Of Course you are playing by the rules. All properties landed on must sell - even if by auction, no free parking payout, chance cards are not optional, no banker loans, and there are a finite number of houses which caps development for the late-comers.

It's as ruthless and unpleasant as a game of Sorry but that's the point, capitalism is only great when you're winning.

You are exactly right, because Monopoly was literally invented as a propaganda device to show how awful capitalism is. The game was literally meant to be unpleasant and soul-draining. But... something went wrong. People took it at face value, and claim to be enjoying the experience. Stockholm Syndrome?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game#Descript...

Well, I enjoy playing it, and appreciate the message. The best bit for me is the auctioning of the properties, however.

The way we played tic-tac-toe as kids is with three pebbles, so like the Romans, but one can move a pebble only to an adjacent position. Unfortunately, there's a winning algorithm for whoever starts.

> I wonder why the modern variant is the one that is most well known?

Humans are getting dumber with each generation. Things get dumbed down over time. You can observe this everywhere.

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