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Tic-tac-toe (American English), noughts and crosses (Commonwealth English), or Xs and Os (Canadian or Irish English) is a paper-and-pencil game for two players who take turns marking the spaces in a three-by-three grid with X or O. The player who succeeds in placing three of their marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row is the winner. It is a solved game, with a forced draw assuming best play from both players. In American English, the game is known as "tic-tac-toe". In Commonwealth English (particularly British, South African, Australian and New Zealand English), the game is known as "noughts and crosses". This name derives from the shape of the marks in the game (i.e the X and O); "nought" is an older name for the number zero, while "cross" refers to the X shape. While the term nought is now less commonly used, the name "noughts and crosses" is still preferred over the American name "tic-tac-toe" in these countries. Tic-tac-toe is played on a three-by-three grid by two players, who alternately place the marks X and O in one of the nine spaces in the grid. In the following example, the first player (X) wins the game in seven steps: There is no universally agreed rule as to who plays first, but in this article the convention that X plays first is used. Players soon discover that the best play from both parties leads to a draw. Hence, tic-tac-toe is often played by young children who may not have discovered the optimal strategy. Because of the simplicity of tic-tac-toe, it is often used as a pedagogical tool for teaching the concepts of good sportsmanship and the branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the searching of game trees. It is straightforward to write a computer program to play tic-tac-toe perfectly or to enumerate the 765 essentially different positions (the state space complexity) or the 26,830 possible games up to rotations and reflections (the game tree complexity) on this space. If played optimally by both players, the game always ends in a draw, making tic-tac-toe a futile game.

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