Programming Python, 3rd Edition

PyToe: A Tic-Tac-Toe Game Widget

Finally, a bit of fun to close out this chapter; our last example, PyToe, implements an artificially intelligent tic-tac-toe (sometimes called “naughts and crosses”) game-playing program in Python. Most readers are probably familiar with this simple game, so I won’t dwell on its details. In short, players take turns marking board positions, in an attempt to occupy an entire row, column, or diagonal. The first player to fill such a pattern wins.

In PyToe, board positions are marked with mouse clicks, and one of the players is a Python program. The game board itself is displayed with a simple Tkinter GUI; by default, PyToe builds a 3 × 3 game board (the standard tic-tac-toe setup), but it can be configured to build and play an arbitrary N×N game.

When it comes time for the computer to select a move, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are used to score potential moves and search a tree of candidate moves and countermoves. This is a fairly simple problem as gaming programs go, and the heuristics used to pick moves are not perfect. Still, PyToe is usually smart enough to spot wins a few moves in advance of the user.

Running PyToe

PyToe’s GUI is implemented as a frame of packed labels, with mouse-click bindings on the labels to catch user moves. The label’s text is configured with the player’s mark after each move, computer or user. The GuiMaker class we coded earlier in the prior chapter is also reused here to add a simple menu bar at the top (but no ...