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Tic-Tac-Toe-Playing LEGO Robot
David Primo writes "TechEBlog has an interesting article on a Tic-Tac-Toe-playing LEGO robot named WOPR — created by Bryan Bonahoom. It uses built-in sensors and a custom program to challenge humans. Video included. From the article: 'The NXT display also enables the inclusion of instructions to the user on resetting the robot. This allowed WOPR to run unattended.'"
Charles Babbage designed one of these.
m l
http://www.adit.co.uk/html/noughts_and_crosses.ht
The latest Slashdot meme.
Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken.
Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.
Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
Warhammer forums
I wonder if I can reprogram it to play a nice game of Global Thermo-Nuclear War.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
What a terrible tic-tac-toe algorithm-- the robot could have forced a win, but chose the wrong move!
How appropriate that the demonstration video ends in a draw...
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Seems like it need to be tweaked so that it "drops" it's own pieces closer to the "board", as you can see at the end that one of the pieces misses it's spot.
Pretty neat, would have liked to see if the robot can actually win, if he can start (and the human's first move is not the center spot)
- sigs are for wimps.
The only way to win is not to play
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
But this robot can't win at Tic-Tac-Toe? Guess it's just more proof for how silly the game is. Why not teach it to play checkers or Connect Four? Also, can it run Linux?
True AI would engage your mind on the deeper meaning of Tic-Tac-Toe.
AI has been solved.
Technological Singularity is near.
In a game of Tic-Tac-Toe, the only way to defeat an opponent who knows how to play the game is to hope he misses something or to hide your moves from him. On a 3x3 board, it's easy for a microprocessor to be programmed with all possible countermoves.
Most tic-tac-toe games end in draws, even human-human ones, for that reason.
A bunch of MIT students created a tic-tac-toe playing computer a LONG time ago, out of *Tinker Toys*.
n kertoyComputer/TinkerToy.html
I know it was a long time ago, because:
a) I saw it in the Boston Computer Museum in 1991 and it had been "broken for years"
b) Nobody plays with Tinkey Toys anymore... And hasn't since about 1975.
Ah, here's a neat article from Sci Am in 1989 (probably the one I read which caused me to seek it out in 1991): http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/472_html/Intro/Ti
For the impatient, there is a photo on the last page.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
It sounds like someone's telling us a WOPR.
I remember a 1980 or 1981 tv news story from the University of Illinois where a robot "solved" Rubik's Cube -- early on in the phenomena -- in just over 15 minutes.
The press paid attention to the WHO and the WHEN rather than the WHAT and HOW of the story. Color recognition from the camera and the mechanics were the real issue:
The computer used had actually solved each puzzle in the first ten seconds while onlookers watched the mechanical contraption in suspense for the next quarter hour.
what happenes when you put two robotic Tic-Tac-Toe-Playing LEGO robots together?
Once lego releases the full SDK and such (i.e. complete details to write your own firmware and download to the NXT), I wouldnt be surprised if someone ports soemthing that could be called "linux" to it...
Or failing that, one of the BSD variants (hey, if BSD can run on a toaster, it could probobly run on a NXT brick)
I was taught to code the AI of a tic-tac-toe game using the Minimax Algorithm when I was in school. This is a simple yet good example of creating artificial intelligence, which I believe many programming beginners can adopt and make their very first AI enabled game.
In this story, the game is played with a real board. That is the hard part.
w00t
at 2007 science fairs 4H competitions everywhere.
This shouldn't be too daunting. I seem to remember BASIC programs for tic-tac-toe in '80s training manuals. Tie in the response to pickup and placement. The various options for input is where the challenge lies.
The software behind the Lego NXT is the same software behind much embedded computing design: LabView by National Instruments (http://www.ni.com). At the recent NI Week User Group Meeting in Austin, they announced a new toolkit for Mindstorm NXT that will be released in December, which will allow Labview users to work with the robots directly and do many more powerful things with them. This is a very worthy endeavor, since National Instruments is putting much of the profit back into the Mindstorm Consortium...an educational foundation devoted to growing the numbers of children interested in science, engineering and math. Walt Boyes Editor in Chief Control www.controlglobal.com
Haven't folks already programmed LEGO bots to play connect four? Some can even beat kids who play against them.
OTOH tic tac toe has almost no complexity, so what's the big deal?
It is in fact much easier to design a robot that will always win than designing one that will occasionally win. I'm somewhat surprised to see the many people lecture about the simplicity of the game, but not knowing a thing about it.
I've seen a chicken in chinatown do the same!
some image recognition, an AI that is VERY simple and the output through drawing... big deal
a word on the AI: lesson 1 in artificial intelligence courses are minmax algorithms and since tic-tac-toe is a game with a VERY small game-graph (less than 20000 nodes) it is easy to calculate the best move even by brute-force (a 40 MHz CPU does this in about 1 second) so this is a story that is REALLY REALLY REALLY not worth telling
slownewsday i'd say... let's see the news about IE7 RC1... THERE will be some funny comments =)
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Like those?
// hdw
http://mindstorms.lego.com/Overview/NXTreme.aspx
Executive Pope (small) Kallisti Engineering
This robot is awesome, do you know that it's build just with standard Lego Mindstorms NXT for $250? And comments are really boring.
Can you play tic tac toe with it over the 'net?
;)
In a similar fasion that you can drive my LEGO Mindstorms NXT robot over the 'net with live camera?
http://turbogfx.homelinux.org/legocam
I was at Brickfest and played with this robot in person. It was actually a very cool system he had set up. The game also had 3 levels of play.
I got beat at t-t-t by a chicken at a petting zoo (Bushkill Falls, Poconos PA.) Every time. I never played it again.
The light at the end of the tunnel is a train.