Negamax

ordinary tic-tac-toe is a solved bore — both players draw with a lookup table. glue nine boards together and add one rule about where you are allowed to move, and suddenly the game tree is deep enough that you need actual search theory: minimax, the negamax reformulation, alpha-beta pruning, and a heuristic to stand in for the leaves you cannot reach. this page documents the agent my partner and i wrote for unsw comp3411 (assignment 3, “nine-board tic-tac-toe”), warts and all — and the warts are instructive. 𐃏