The IIS Chip Gallery
TicTacToe (1989)
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| Application | Fun |
| Technology | 2000 |
| Manufacturer | VLSI Tech |
| Type | Semester Thesis |
| Package | DIP64 |
| Dimensions | 3200μm x 3200μm |
| Gates | 900 |
| Voltage | 5 V |
| Clock | 6 MHz |
This is an IC for playing the most funny game of Tic Tac Toe. It is an implementation of the famous board game played on a three by three board. The chip plays Tic-Tac-Toe against a human opponent. To calculate its moves, it uses the Minimax algorithm with Alpha-Beta pruning. Because of the limited complexity of the problem, the search tree can be evaluated to the very end, the chip thus being able to determine the exact value of every possible move. In other words, it will not lose.
Peter Geiser has kindly provided the technical documentation of the chip which includes, the complete schematics of the circuit.
This is the game featured in the movie War Games from the year 1983. In the climax of the movie, the protagonist of the movie played by Matthew Broderick, convinces a rogue intelligent computer that is threating to start a nuclear war that some games can not have a winner by playing Tic Tac Toe. The computer realizes by playing Tic Tac Toe, that no nuclear war scenario would have a winner, and the best move is not to play (start a war) at all.