“Sing along and say your name!
Dance the way you want ain’t no shame!
Scream and laugh and make everyone insane!
Be like a child always! ’cause life is a nice game!”
This may be one of the first game every child plays! One of the few games which is so simple to learn and can be played without any limitation of age!
The amazing thing is that even an illiterate person can play the game and win it! Though some amount of luck is required to win it, most of the time simple strategies and placing the first point makes or breaks the game!
You can play it on paper or without one!
Rich or poor, everyone has to play the same way and this may be one game which is seen all over the world with variations in name and points used!
You would have played it with your father and child or even grand father!
The very simple but interesting game called; Tic-tac-toe!
Now the very first traces of tic-tac-toe go back to Egypt, which has remnants of 3×3 game boards on roofing tiles from 1300 BCE. Other variations included the terni lapilli
(three pebbles at a time) from the Roman Empire, three men’s morris from various
parts of Asia, and Picaria from Native Americans.
The game’s grid markings have been found chalked all over Rome. Another closely related ancient game is three men’s morris which is also played on a simple grid and requires three pieces in a row to finish and Picaria which is a game of the Puebloans.
The first print reference to “noughts and crosses” was as a British name which appeared in 1858, in an issue of Notes and Queries.
While the first the first print reference to a game called “tic-tac-toe” occurred in 1884, but referred to “a children’s game played on a slate, consisting of trying with the eyes shut to bring the pencil down on one of the numbers of a set, the number hit being scored”.
“Tic-tac-toe” may also derive from “tick-tack”, the name of an old version of backgammon first described in 1558.
In 1952, OXO (or Noughts and Crosses), developed by British computer scientist Sandy Douglas for the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge, became one of the first known video games. The computer player could play perfect games of tic-tac-toe against a human opponent!
Of course as mentioned in an earlier blog, ‘Tennis for two’ was the official first video game though in 1948, ten years before Higginbotham’s Tennis for Two, Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle R. Mann patented the “Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device,” making this currently the earliest-documented video game predecessor! OXO could be the practical second video game ever produced! Then again it is more popular as a non video game!
In 1975, tic-tac-toe was also used by MIT students to demonstrate the computational power of Tinkertoy elements. The Tinkertoy computer, made out of (almost) only Tinkertoys, is able to play tic-tac-toe perfectly! On a dull day our school book’s last pages were full of these games! Youth of course were spent listening to the songs! One such album was Alaipayuthey starring birthday celebrity Ranganathan Madhavan! Recently saw the movie Shaitaan starring Maddy! The ending was good but I felt that he would have been better in the role of Ajay and Ajay should have played Maddy’s role!
Now listen to some old Maddy songs and sleep!
Shubh Ratri!
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