Saturday, May 12, 2007

It's high time to draw the line, put an end to this game

My initial reaction to this cartoon was that it wasn't plausible, because no one plays tic tac toe that badly.

But maybe that's a little unfair. It appears that the opening move was the second-best possible opening, and it's only the second move that was truly atrocious. None of the other moves matter.

3 Comments:

At 10:30 AM, May 13, 2007, Blogger Scott said...

Well, physicians are notorously unmathematical...

Just this morning I watched Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine, in which it's alleged that Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in 1997 only because the latter was assisted by one or more hidden human players on IBM's payroll. Kasparov's argument is that the computer appeared to make moves that only a human could come up with. Presumably, the physician in the cartoon would fail the inverse Turing test just as Kasparov felt the IBM team had...

 
At 3:33 PM, May 24, 2007, Blogger Matt Bruce said...

I'm two weeks late to the party but regardless of what X's first and O's first moves were, didn't O's first move guarantee X a win?

If X starts in the center, any edge square loses for O; if X starts in a corner, any non-center move loses for O.

 
At 2:57 PM, July 15, 2007, Blogger Richard Mason said...

Yes, by "second move" I was referring to O's first move.

 

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