Qubic

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Qubic is the brand name of a four-in-a-row game played in a 4×4×4 matrix by Parker Brothers in the late 1960s. Players alternately place pieces to get four in a row. The original board was made of clear plastic with colored circular markers, but is no longer marketed. Markers can be placed in any order, rather than stacked in a pile on a square, as in Score Four.

The first player will win if there are two optimal players. There are 76 winning lines. It was weakly solved by Eugene Mahalko in 1976, Oren Patashnik in 1980 and then solved again by Victor Allis using proof-number search. A plotter based 3D computer game was written by Arthur Hu and Carl Hu in 1975 on a HP 9830 in Lindbergh High School . It used 4 stacked trapezoids. It was later ported to the HP 2647 demo tape with a graphical interface, using a simple mathematical transform to solve for 3D input position. It also was included in the Microsoft Windows Entertainment Pack in the 1990s as part of TicTactics.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Eugene D. Mahalko, A Possible Win Strategy for the Game of Qubic, Computer Science Master's Thesis, Brigham Young University, 1976
Oren Patashnik, Qubic: 4 x 4 x 4 Tic-Tac-Toe, Mathematical Magazine 53 (1980) 202216
L.V. Allis, P.N.A. Schoo, Qubic solved again, in: H.J. van den Herik, L.V. Allis (Eds.), Heuristic Programming in Artificial Intelligence 3: The Third Computer Olympiad. Ellis Horwood, Chichester, 1992, pp. 192-204.