Portal:Sports and games

The Sports and Games Portal

A sport is a physical activity or skill carried out under a publicly agreed set of rules, and with a recreational purpose: for competition, for self-enjoyment, to attain excellence, for the development of skill, or some combination of these. The difference of purpose is what characterises sport, combined with the notion of individual (or team) skill or prowess.

A game is a recreational activity involving one or more players, defined by a goal that the players try to reach, and some set of rules that determines what the players can do. Games are played primarily for entertainment or enjoyment, but may also serve an educational or simulational role.

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Tic-tac-toe is a pencil-and-paper game for two players, O and X, who take turns marking the spaces in a 3×3 grid. The player who succeeds in placing three respective marks in a horizontal, vertical or diagonal row wins the game.

Players soon discover that best play from both parties leads to a draw. Hence, tic-tac-toe is most often played by very young children; when they have discovered an unbeatable strategy they move on to more sophisticated games such as dots and boxes.

The simplicity of tic-tac-toe makes it ideal as a pedagogical tool for teaching the concepts of combinatorial game theory 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, 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.

The first known video game, OXO (or Noughts and Crosses, 1952) for the EDSAC computer played perfect games of tic-tac-toe against a human opponent.

One example of a Tic-Tac-Toe playing computer is the Tinkertoy computer, developed by MIT students, and made out of Tinker Toys. It only plays Tic-Tac-Toe, and has never lost a game. It is currently on display at the Museum of Science, Boston.

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Did you know ...

• ... that the first Rose Bowl game (pictured) was played between Fielding Yost's Michigan Wolverines and Stanford?
• ... that the first collectible card game was The Base Ball Card Game produced by The Allegheny Card Co. and registered on April 5, 1904
• ... that the British ice hockey team The Blackburn Hawks are often referred to as the Blackhawks, and were briefly called the Lancashire Hawks?
• ... that Russian President Vladimir Putin said, "Chess makes man wiser and clear-sighted"?
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