tact 0.52

tact project is a 2D/3D console tic-tac-toe program.
tact is a curses-based tic-tac-toe program that supports arbitrary sized 2D and 3D versions of tic-tac-toe, network play, and several computer players of varying intelligence, all of which can play either you, or each other, on any board size.
The most intelligent computer player can play perfectly (in real time) on all 2D boards, and all 3D boards except 4x4x4.
Main features:
- Curses interface (if you have ncurses you can use the mouse - welcome to the seventies!). There are options for changing the colors of the board, background, and pieces.
- If you dont have curses, or have curses and dont want to use it, there is also an ASCII interface (useful for larger board sizes or redirecting computer vs. computer games to a file). Also, if youre using a crappy terminal there is a chance the ASCII interface actually looks better than the curses one.
- Both the curses and ASCII use the same menu system, where you can configure most options for the game. All options may be configured using command line arguments (see the man page).
- Network play
- Arbitrary sized boards, both 2D and 3D
- Five types of players (all of which may play each other in any combination on all board sizes and dimensions)
- Human
- Network
- Computer Heurstic (three modes: easy, medium, hard, all of which are beatable).
- Computer Search, using standard alpha-beta algorithm. Depending on how far ahead you tell it to search, this player can play perfectly on all sized boards. For all board sizes and dimensions except 4x4x4, a search depth of 2 is all that is necessary to ensure perfect play. tact cannot play perfectly on 4x4x4 unless a very large search depth is used (probably on the order of a month!). This player also makes use of transposition tables (it caches various states so when they are again encountered it does not need to search again). On my computer, tact can play 10,000 perfect games of 3x3 (searching all the way to the bottom) in about 2 seconds, without the transposition tables, this takes about 32 seconds).
- Random (useful for benchmarking heurstic players).
Enhancements:
- Now compiles with GCC 3.x (2.x was more forgiving)
- Minor I/O (both curses and ASCII mode) fixes