Strategy set in Tic-Tac-Toe

Question

I read in a book that the cardinality of the strategy set of the first player in a game of Tic-Tac-Toe is approximately equal to $10^{126}$ but I cannot see how to arrive at this result.

Disclaimer: I don' t want to calculate how many sub-games there are!

Note: the number you give is absurdly high. There are $9$ possible moves all in all and no game can last longer than $9$ moves, so $9^9$ is already absurdly high. — lulu, Jul 05 '16 at 00:15
No, this is the number of games you can play, not the number I want. — richarddedekind, Jul 05 '16 at 00:15
I'll retract the close vote. You want a dictionary of all possible first moves, then all possible responses to second moves and so on. Very path dependent. Number might grow pretty high. — lulu, Jul 05 '16 at 00:19
I don't see how it can be higher than 9! +9!/2! + 9!/3!+.... but I'm not entirely sure how strategies sets work. — fleablood, Jul 05 '16 at 02:05
What book did you read. That can't be right. It just ... can't. — fleablood, Jul 05 '16 at 02:25
Are you sure that it wasn't 138? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tic-tac-toe — fleablood, Jul 05 '16 at 02:31

Xoff · Accepted Answer · 2016-07-09T09:26:40.697

4

A strategy is a function defined from all possible positions to all possibles moves you can make from that position.

Note that there are $3^9$ positions in this game (at most) and 9 possibles moves at most there are at most $9^{3^9}$ possible such functions.

Of course much less because you can only consider the positions before you have to play that you can reach after previously applying the strategy so it's more like

$$9\times 7^{8}\times 5^{8\times 6}\times 3^{8\times 6\times 4}\times 1\approx 10^{132}$$

A little bit less because some games will end before filling the board.

edited Jul 09 '16 at 09:26

answered Jul 08 '16 at 16:02

Xoff

10,493

I have a question. At the second move of the first player there are $8\times 9$ possible positions so why it isn' t $7^{8\times 9}$? The same question goes to exponents of $5$ and $3$. – richarddedekind Jul 09 '16 at 15:37
1

@LivaditisAlex because the strategy choose (always the same one for a given strategy) a possible position at first move, so there are indeed only 8 possible positions at the second move. – Xoff Jul 09 '16 at 15:44
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@LivaditisAlex in fact a strategy doesn't need to define what to do if you did not apply the strategy. – Xoff Jul 09 '16 at 15:47
OK. Understood. Thanks! – richarddedekind Jul 09 '16 at 16:25
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@LivaditisAlex: You are correct: For subgame perfect Nash equilibrium (Selten won a Nobel Prize for it), a strategy needs to specify what the player does in all subgames including those subgames that would never be reached if the player followed the strategy in the first place. – Sergio Parreiras Jul 16 '16 at 19:55

Strategy set in Tic-Tac-Toe

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