Tic Tac Toe part 1: The Game
Welcome to the fourteenth edition of Elixir Quiz. This week we will be starting another multi-week project in which we create a multi player game of Tic Tac Toe.
In previous weeks we built our first multi-week project, where we completed the poker game. The point of the poker game was to learn more about pattern matching. This time we’re building a much simpler game, so that we can focus on the multi-user party of the application, and learn more about OTP.
Tic Tac Toe
Tic Tac Toe is a traditional pen and paper game played by 2 players.
The game takes place on a 3x3 grid, with players taking turns placing their token (either an X or a O) in an available square. A winner is determined when one player places 3 tokens in a row, either vertically, horizontally or diagonally. A draw is declared if all 9 squares are populated with tokens without a line of 3 existing for either player.
The problem
Create a project that allows a person to play a game of Tic Tac Toe against a computer player. The AI doesn’t need to be sophisticated, and can be as simple as choosing random squares to place it’s token.
Remember that we’re planning on expanding this into a larger, multi-user system. We will eventually want to have many different games running simultaneously, so having a game run as a process, with connected processes for each player may be a good idea.
For reference on how a multiplayer game can hang together in an OTP application, check out Martin Schurrer’s talk at ElixirConf 2014.
How do I enter?
Part 1 of the Tic Tac Toe quiz runs from Saturday November 22nd 2014 until Friday November 28th, 2014.
To enter, just complete the problem and post a link to the code on Twitter, and mention @elixir_quiz. As always, you can host your code anywhere (like Github Gists), or post your solution directly into the subreddit post.
Example solutions
After the quiz period ends on November 28th, I will update this section and talk about some interesting solutions that were posted on Twitter.