The Tic Tac Toe Robot


Description



The Tic Tac Robot is just that: a robot that plays Tic Tac Toe. "So what?" you may ask. What engineering concepts does that involve? Quite a few, actually, so read on!

The robot would be required to do several things: it must be able to move the various pieces around the board (in this case, different colored squares rather than X's and O's). It would have to include some algorithm to play the game correctly, and it must be able to react to external inputs (i.e. another player, whether human or machine).


Engineering Conepts


This is a very computer science-oriented project. Most of the concepts listed below come from that field. This is ok, since computer science seems to have been left out of a lot of project ideas (except for things like real-time programming, which will be a part of almost every project). However, there are a few ideas from other areas as well.
  1. Sensory Input/Control Systems
  2. Algorithms/Artificial Intelligence (if you've got a really clever person)
  3. Algorithm Complexity
  4. Robotics
  5. Problem Solving
  6. Creativity

The algorithm complexity issue is the really important item here. This is something that freshmen never really learn about. It's pretty important for CS majors, and also quite useful for other engineers when they do their own programming. If a particular robot takes 30 minutes to make a move, it's very unlikely that the opposing player will make a move any time soon, because they've probably left!


Competition


This project just begs to include competition. Tic Tac Toe robot championships, human vs. machine, the ultimate test of endurance (well, it will be for those designing these things...).

One interesting idea with this project is to include a Web interface to the robot. This way, anyone on the Web could play a game of Tic Tac Toe against it. This would be a great way to introduce freshmen engineers to the internet and its possibilities. They might just see that the computer can be used for more than just multiplying matricies.

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