Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/30/in-this-tic-tac-toe-variant-pl.html
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I’m so sick of the trend of putting stupid-looking expressions in YouTube thumbnails.
That is pretty cool. I will have to try this next time we are waiting around for food while out.
That’s fun. I’ll have to try it. I’ve played 3d and 4d tick-tac-toe with my son. with 4d, turns out that once you get the hang of it, the player who goes first always wins, but still it’s a lot of fun figuring out all of the variants that will let you win.
We thought about playing 5d, but balked when we realized we needed to draw 27 boards in order to play. This did get me thinking that it would be fun to create a webapp that allows you to play Xd tic tac toe, where X is a number somewhat less than 10. Not that I’m willing to build it, but I think that someone should.
It has to do with YouTube algorithms that rank thumbnails with the goofy expression higher than others.
ETA: I cant find the original article that discusses this. But it boils down to human nature to notice surprised expressions more. This causes a tendency to click on thumbnails with faces 30% more often than thumbnails without. After a while the algorithm notices this trend too, but doesnt necessarily know why, and boosts those videos more. Finally content creators figure this out and put faces on their thumbnails all the time.
Then there’s 6d tic-tac-toe, but that tends to open the Lament Configuration when solved.
An interesting theorem to contemplate: a game is either futile or unfair. So go figure.
(for two-person, finite, transitive, etc…games)
I will memorize this!
Or you could just play Quarto
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