A

PROJECT REPORT
ON
“TIC TAC TOE GAME”
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the IV semester

of

BACHELOR OF TECHNOLOGY

IN

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Submitted By:

1. AHTESHEM AHAMAD KHAN

2. SYED ABDUL QUDDUS

Under the supervision

of Mr. AGNIVESH
PANDEY
(Asst. Professor)

DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY,
GURU GHASIDAS VISHWAVIDYALAYA BILASPUR, INDIA
(CENTRAL UNIVERSITY)
SESSION 2012-2013
 GURU GHASIDAS VISHWAVIDYALAYA BILASPUR, INDIA

CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the project entitled “Tic Tac Toe

Game” carried out by “Ahteshem Ahamad Khan and Syed
Abdul Quddus” under my supervision at Department of
Information Technology, Institute of Technology, Guru
Ghasidas Vishwavidyalaya, Bilaspur.

The work is original, as it has not been submitted earlier

either in part or full for any purpose before.

Mr. Agnivesh Pandey

(Asst. Professor)
 DECLARATION

We, hereby declare that the work presented in this

dissertation entitled “TIC TAC TOE GAME” has been
done by us, and this dissertation embodies our own work.

Name of team members:

1. Ahteshem Ahamad Khan

2. Syed Abdul
Quddus
 Project Supervisor :
Approved By:
Mr. Agnivesh Pandey
Dr. Amit Khaskalam

HEAD (I.T.)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thanks Mr. Agnivesh Pandey (Asst. Professor) who

have been the great inspiration and who have provided
sufficient background knowledge and understanding of
this subject.

Our humble prostration goes to our H.O.D. Dr. Amit

Khaskalam , for providing all the necessary resources and
environment ,which have aided us to complete this project
successfully.

We offer our sincere thanks to our respected faculty

members Mr. Pankaj Chandra (Asst. Professor) ,Mr.
Suhail Ahmed (Asst. Professor), Mr. Deepak Netam
(Asst. Professor), Mr. Abhishek Jain (Asst. Professor) ,
Mr.Anand Prakash Rawal (Asst. Professor), Mr. Santosh
Soni (Asst. Professor), Ms. Akanksha Gupta (Asst.
Professor) which has enabled us to bring out this useful
technical resource.

We owe a very special thanks to Dr. Shailendra Kumar

who have have been great source of support for us.

We feel privileged to extend our deep sense of gratitude

to our parents for their support and encouragement.

Last but not least we would like to thank our friends

Akhtar Mansuri, Danish Ali, Irfan Khan, Abhay Gupta,
Ramesh Dubey, Sushim Kumar, Arvind Kumar, Ankur
Mishra, Devanshu Pal, Arpit Goyal , Rakesh Choudhary ,
Santosh Meena and all classmates for their support in
completing the project.

PREFACE
This report is an introduction to the Tic Tac Toe game in
C programming. Anybody, who doesn’t know even the
basics of Tic Tac Toe in C ,will be certainly able to
understand and gain the great knowledge from this report.
The core theme of the report focuses on the development
of Tic Tac Toe game in C language.
The report also contains the strategy of making Tic Tac
Toe game which serve a good idea to make a Tic Tac Toe
game program in C language to the programmer .
The most of the idea of making this game and report is
taken from “ Let Us C - by Yashwant Kanetkar’’ ,
Schaum’s Outline-C(TMH publications), and Internet
(Wikipedia ,Google,Yahoo ,etc.) .

APRIL 2013
Ahteshem Ahamad Khan
Syed
Abdul Quddus

CONTENTS
1. PREFACE………………………………………………
………….. 1

2. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS….…………………………
………… 2

3. WHAT IS TIC TAC TOE ?

……………………………………… 3

4. STRATEGY……………………………………………
………...... 4

5. PROGRAM FOR TIC TAC

TOE GAME.............................11

6. CONCLUSION…………………………………………
……….. 19

7. REFERENCE…………………………………………
…………... 20
 WHAT IS TIC TAC TOE?
Tic-tac-toe is not a very challenging game for human
beings. If you’re an enthusiast, you’ve probably moved
from the basic game to some variant like three
dimensional tic-tac-toe on a larger grid. If you sit down
right now to play ordinary three-by-three tic-tac-toe with
a friend, what will probably happen is that every game
will come out a tie. Both you and your friend can
probably play perfectly, never making a mistake that
would allow your opponent to win. But can you describe
how you know where to move each turn? Most of the
time, you probably aren’t even aware of alternative
possibilities; you just look at the board and instantly know
where you want to move. That kind of instant knowledge
is great for human beings, because it makes you a fast
player. But it isn’t much help in writing a computer
program. For that, you have to know very explicitly what
your strategy is.
STRATEGY / ALGORITHM USED IN CODING
The highest-priority and the lowest-priority rules seemed
obvious to me right away.The highest-priority are these:
1. If I can win on this move,do it.
2. If the other player can win on the next move,block that
winning square.
Here are the lowest-priority rules,used only if there is
nothing suggested more strongly by the board position:
n-2. Take the center square if it’s free.
n-1. Take a corner square if one is free.
n. Take whatever is available.
The highest priority rules are the ones dealing with the
most urgent situations:either I or my opponent can win on
the next move.The lowest priority ones deal with the least
urgent situations,in which there is nothing special about
the moves already made to guide me.
What was harder was to find the rules in between.I knew
that the goal of my own tic-tac-toe strategy was to set up
a fork, a board position in which I have two winning
moves,
 so my opponent can only block one of them.
 Here is an example:
x o
x
x o

X can win by playing in square 3 or

square 4.It’s O’s turn,
but poor O can only block one of those squares at a time.
Whichever O picks, X will then win by picking the other
one. Given this concept of forking, I decided to use it as
the next highest priority rule:
3. If I can make a move that will set up a fork for myself,
do it.That was the end of the easy part. My first attempt at
writing the program used only these six rules.
Unfortunately, it lost in many different situations. I
needed to add something, but I had trouble finding a good
rule to add. My first idea was that rule 4 should be the
defensive equivalent of rule 3, just as rule 2 is the
defensive equivalent of rule 1:
4a. If, on the next move, my opponent can set up a
fork,block that possibility by moving into the square that
is common to his two winning combinations.
In other words, apply the same search technique to the
opponent’s position that I applied to my own.This strategy
works well in many cases, but not all. For example, here is
a sequence of moves under this strategy,with the human
player moving first:
o o o o o x o
x x x x x
x x x

In the fourth grid, the computer (playing O) has

discovered that X can set up a fork by moving in square 6,
between the winning combinations 456and 369. The
computer moves to block this fork.
Unfortunately,X can also set up a fork by moving in
squares 3, 7, or 8. The computer’s move in square 6 has
blocked one combination of the square-3 fork,but X can
still set up the other two. In the fifth grid, X has moved in
square 8. This sets up the winning combinations 258 and
789.The computer can only block one of these, and X will
win on the next move.
Since X has so many forks available, does this mean that
the game was already hopeless before O moved in square
6? No. Here is something O could have done:

x
 o
x

o o
x x
x o x

o o
x x x x o
o x o x

In this sequence, the computer’s second move is in square

7. This move also blocks a fork, but it wasn’t chosen for
that reason. Instead, it was chosen to force X’s next move .
In the fifth grid, X has had to move in square 4, to prevent
an immediate win by O. The advantage of this situation
for O is that square 4 was not one of the ones with which
X could set up a fork. O’s next move, in the sixth grid, is
also forced. But by then the board is too crowded for
either player to force a win; the game ends in a tie, as
usual.
This analysis suggests a different choice for an
intermediate-level strategy rule, taking the offensive:
4b.If I can make a move that will set up a winning
combination for myself, do it. Compared to my earlier
try,this rule has the benefit of simplicity. It’s much easier
for the program to look for a single winning combination
than for a fork, which is two such combinations with a
common square.
Unfortunately, this simple rule isn’t quite good enough. In
the example just above,the computer found the winning
combination in which it already had square 1,and the
other two were free. But why should it choose to move in
square 7 rather than square 4? If the program did choose
square 4, then X’s move would still be forced, into square
7.
We would then have forced X into creating a fork, which
would defeat the program on the next move.
It seems that there is no choice but to combine the ideas
from rules 4a and 4b:
4. If I can make a move that will set up a winning
combination for myself, do it. But ensure that this move
does not force the opponent into establishing a fork. What
this means is that we are looking for a winning
combination in which the computer already owns one
square and the other two are empty. Having found such a
combination, we can move in either of its empty squares.
Whichever we choose, the opponent will be forced to
choose the other one on the next move. If one of the two
empty squares would create a fork for the opponent, then
the computer must choose that square and leave the other
for the opponent.
What if both of the empty squares in the combination we
find would make forks for the opponent? In that case,
we’ve chosen a bad winning combination. It turns out that
there is only one situation in which this can happen:
x x
o

x
o
x
Again, the computer is playing O. After the third grid, it is
looking for a possible winning combination for itself.
There are three possibilities: 258,357 and 456. So far we
have not given the computer any reason to prefer one over
another. But here is what happens if the program happens
to choose 357:
x x
o

x x o
o o
x x

x o
o
x x
By this choice, the computer has forced its opponent into
a fork that will win the game for the opponent. If the
computer chooses either of the other two possible winning
combinations, the game ends in a tie. (All moves after this
choice turn out to be forced.)
This particular game sequence was very troublesome for
me because it goes against most of the rules I had chosen
earlier. For one thing, the correct choice for the program
is any edge square, while the corner squares must be
avoided. This is the opposite of the usual priority.
Another point is that this situation contradicts rule 4a
(prevent forks for the other player) even more sharply
than the example we considered earlier. In that example,
rule 4a wasn’t enough guidance to ensure a correct
choice, but the correct choice was at least with the rule.
That is, just blocking a fork isn’t enough, but threatening
a win and blocking a fork is better than just threatening a
win alone. This is the meaning of rule 4. But in this new
situation, the corner square (the move we have to avoid)
block a fork, while the edge square (the correct move)
block a fork!
When I discovered this anomalous case, I was ready to
give up on the idea of beautiful, general rules. I almost
decided to build into the program a special check for this
precise board configuration. That would have been pretty
ugly, I think. But a shift in viewpoint makes this case
easier to understand: What the program must do is force
the other player’s move, and force it in a way that helps
the computer win. If one possible winning combination
doesn’t allow us to meet these conditions, the program
should try another combination. My mistake was to think
either about forcing alone (rule 4b) or about the
opponent’s forks alone (rule 4a).
As it turns out, the board situation we’ve been considering
is the only one in which a possible winning combination
could include two possible forks for the opponent. What’s
more, in this board situation, it’s a diagonal combination
that gets us in trouble, while a horizontal or vertical
combination is always okay. Therefore, I was able to
implement rule 4 in a way that only considers one
possible winning combination by setting up the
program’s data structures so that diagonal combinations
are the last to be chosen. This trick makes the program’s
design less than obvious from reading the actual program,
but it does save the program some effort.
PROGRAM FOR TIC TAC TOE GAME:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
char matrix[3][3];
char check(void);
void init_matrix(void);
void get_player_move(void);
void get_computer_move(void);
void disp_matrix(void);
int main(void)
{
char done;
printf("This is the game of Tic Tac Toe.\n");
printf("You will be playing against the computer.\n");
done = ' ';
init_matrix();
do {
disp_matrix();
get_player_move();
done = check();
if(done!= ' ') break;
get_computer_move();
done = check();
}
while(done== ' ');
if(done=='X')
printf("You won!\n");
else printf("I won!!!!\n");
disp_matrix();
return 0;
}
void init_matrix(void)
{
int i, j;
for(i=0; i<3; i++)
for(j=0; j<3; j++) matrix[i][j] = ' ';
}
void get_player_move(void)
{
int x, y;
printf("Enter X,Y coordinates for your move: ");
scanf("%d%*c%d", &x, &y);
x--; y--;
if(matrix[x][y]!= ' ')
{ printf("Invalid move, try again.\
n"); get_player_move();
}
else matrix[x][y] = 'X';
}
void get_computer_move(void)
{
int i, j;
for(i=0; i<3; i++)
{ for(j=0; j<3; j++)
if(matrix[i][j]==' ') break;
if(matrix[i][j]==' ') break;
}
if(i*j==9) {
printf("draw\n");
exit(0);
}
else
matrix[i][j] = 'O';
}
void disp_matrix(void)
{
int t;
for(t=0; t<3; t++) {
printf(" %c | %c | %c ",matrix[t][0],
matrix[t][1], matrix [t][2]);
if(t!=2) printf("\n---|---|---\n");
}
printf("\n");
}
char check(void)
{
int i;
for(i=0; i<3; i++) if(matrix[i]
[0]==matrix[i][1] &&
matrix[i][0]==matrix[i][2]) return matrix[i][0];
for(i=0; i<3; i++) /* check columns */ if(matrix[0]
[i]==matrix[1][i] && matrix[0][i]==matrix[2][i])
return matrix[0][i]; if(matrix[0][0]==matrix[1][1] &&
matrix[1][1]==matrix[2][2])
return matrix[0][0]; if(matrix[0]
[2]==matrix[1][1] && matrix[1]
[1]==matrix[2][0]) return
matrix[0][2];
getch();
return ' ';}
 REFERENCE

1. GOOGLE

2. WIKIPEDIA

3. LET US “C” by Yashwant Kanetkar

4. www.indiabix.com
 CONCLUSION

We make Tic Tac Toe game successfully with the help of

C language and it is very entertaining.