Quantum Tic-Tac-Toe (Noughts and Crosses)

The Game Room
1

Quantum Tic-Tac-Toe is a game that throws in some quantum-like behavior into this otherwise boring game. Here is a web site with an introduction and a java script to play it: http://paradigmpuzzles.com/QT3Play.htm.

Anyway, I get the rules and whatnot, but I have no idea how to construct a strategy. I just make what seem to be random moves, and then I watch things happen. I don’t quite see how to create good entanglements. So, my questions are: What is a viable strategy for playing this game? What are the sorts of structures I should look to make? How do I make things so that whichever way the entanglement collapses to, it can be to my advantage?

2

I only played one game, so this could be wrong, but you want to avoid causing a collapse, since that allows your opponent to choose which collapse happens, which seems to be a pretty powerful decision.
No advice on what entnglements to make, though.

3

Moving to The Game Room.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

4

So far, my best strategy has been to put all of my moves in a single row, and collapse squares with competition ASAP. Avoid the open-ended branching pattern that wins regular games, as you won’t have time to collapse all the squares you’ve marked that way.

5

Is it just multiplayer, or is there some way to play against the computer?

6

The current version of the game is multi-player only - programming the computer to play this new kind of game is rather hard, but something we hope to do someday.

As for strategy, the same fundamentals apply as in any strategy game, but quantum games ad a new twist which I will get to later. First, there is the standard interplay of offensive and defense. In both versions of tic-tac-toe (classical and quantum) the 2nd player (O) has to emphasize defense over offense. This is the same situation in chess, where black (who moves second) also has to emphasize defense over offense, but to a much less degree since chess is longer and more complicated.

Second, is any move which forces the opponent to make a particular response. Ideally, this limits the opponent to just one choice, but even reducing their viable options to just a few moves helps you to keep the initiative. The simple force is a move which if the opponent does not respond immediately allows you to win on the very next move. Finding situations that correspond to a force move lead one to study the end games, nearly complete games with only a few moves left to go.

Third, the fork. This is basically two force moves at once. The opponent can only respond to one, and so an immediate win is guaranteed.

More advanced versions of the force and the fork simply look more than one move ahead.

Now the strategy that is unique to quantum games - this is the cool part. About half-way through the game start looking less at the quantum board than at the set of classical boards it represents. This set is called the classical ensemble, it is shown underneath the quantum board and can consist of as many as 27 simultaneous classical games. These are all the possible “realities” implied by the quantum game in progress. When you make a quantum move it duplicates the classical ensemble, each move of the spooky pair is made in one of the copies, so after a quantum move there are more classical games in the ensemble.

However, when the quantum move entangles with existing moves, or even more dramatically, when it cross entangles existing entanglements, many of the new classical games are not legal. The computer doesn’t even show these. This means that after an entanglement move, there may be fewer classical games. The missing games represent histories that have been erased from existence. Refer to any science fiction story about time travel. So here is the ultimate strategy in quantum games, find the moves that erase all the realities that benefited your opponent.

Put succinctly - attack your opponent’s past.

7

That sound you just heard was my brain exploding.

8

This hurts my head.