May 2025
Intermediate to advanced
584 pages
16h 49m
English
When I was in high school, I wanted to write a tic-tac-toe program that allowed the user to play against a computer. At the time, I was blissfully unaware of how real computer scientists approached such a problem. I had only my own thoughts, and those were to implement a lot of rules using the crude if...then statements and gotos supported by unstructured Applesoft BASIC. My program had a lot of rules—a few hundred lines’ worth.
The game worked well enough until I found the sequence of moves that my rules didn’t cover and was able to win every time. I felt certain that there must be a way to teach a computer how to do things by ...
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