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Tic-Tac-Toe-Playing LEGO Robot 61

Posted by CowboyNeal from the step-right-up dept.
David Primo writes "TechEBlog has an interesting article on a Tic-Tac-Toe-playing LEGO robot named WOPR — created by Bryan Bonahoom. It uses built-in sensors and a custom program to challenge humans. Video included. From the article: 'The NXT display also enables the inclusion of instructions to the user on resetting the robot. This allowed WOPR to run unattended.'"
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Tic-Tac-Toe-Playing LEGO Robot More

Tic-Tac-Toe-Playing LEGO Robot

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  • Old news (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bob Cat - NYMPHS ( 313647 ) on Saturday September 02, 2006 @09:06AM (#16029344) Homepage
    Charles Babbage designed one of these.

    http://www.adit.co.uk/html/noughts_and_crosses.htm l [adit.co.uk]

    • Maybe so, but he didn't make it out of Lego.
      • are you f****ing nuts!? do you know who charles babbage was?
        he didn't build it out of lego, because lego wasn't invented for 140 years!
        he built the damn thing using twine, sticks and gears!
        • do you have a link or reference to this machine?
          • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage [wikipedia.org]
            http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/attic2/ images/182.jpg [ibm.com]
            I'm not sure if this is twine... anyways charles babbage is saied to be the inventor of the computer (lady ada byron was his assistant, she programmed his machine. the programming language "ada" is named after her) I'm not sure if his machine was turing-complete though

            his machine of course didn't play tic-tac-toe on a real board, but the fact that his machine computed the solution is still ver
            • I've been doing some reading. It looks like Babbage only had the idea of building a tic tac toe machine to raise money: 'I imagined that the machine might consist of the figures of two children playing against each other, accompanied by a lamb and a cock. That the child who won the game might clap his hands whilst the cock was crowing, after which, that the child who was beaten might cry and wring his hands whilst the lamb began bleating'. [http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-babbagesdancer3 . html] Then he n
    • now THAT's one impressive information I didn't know so far. thank you

  • tic-tac-toe is so 1983 (Score:5, Funny)

    by legoburner ( 702695 ) on Saturday September 02, 2006 @09:06AM (#16029348) Homepage Journal
    Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken.
    Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.
    Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

  • WOPR? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ndogg ( 158021 ) <the@rhorn.gmail@com> on Saturday September 02, 2006 @09:12AM (#16029359) Homepage Journal
    I wonder if I can reprogram it to play a nice game of Global Thermo-Nuclear War.

  • Tic-tac-toe (Score:4, Funny)

    by Zouden ( 232738 ) on Saturday September 02, 2006 @09:21AM (#16029382)
    How appropriate that the demonstration video ends in a draw...
    • But this robot can't win at Tic-Tac-Toe? Guess it's just more proof for how silly the game is. Why not teach it to play checkers or Connect Four? Also, can it run Linux?
    • It could have won the game though so not such a good player?
    • You do of course know that any good player does not play this game because it all ways ends in a draw against another good player. A bigger board (e.g. 4*4) would be more interesting and harder to program for.

      But there are only a limited number of positions in the 3*3 game, easy to program anything (including small children) to either draw or win.

  • The robot missed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Augusto ( 12068 ) on Saturday September 02, 2006 @09:28AM (#16029391) Homepage
    Seems like it need to be tweaked so that it "drops" it's own pieces closer to the "board", as you can see at the end that one of the pieces misses it's spot.

    Pretty neat, would have liked to see if the robot can actually win, if he can start (and the human's first move is not the center spot)
    • I think he should try it with a matrix bigger than 3x3. Maybe set it to still only have to get three in a row but have a lot more space to do it.

  • Lego? Pfft. (Score:5, Informative)

    by multipartmixed ( 163409 ) on Saturday September 02, 2006 @10:33AM (#16029539) Homepage
    A bunch of MIT students created a tic-tac-toe playing computer a LONG time ago, out of *Tinker Toys*.

    I know it was a long time ago, because:
    a) I saw it in the Boston Computer Museum in 1991 and it had been "broken for years"
    b) Nobody plays with Tinkey Toys anymore... And hasn't since about 1975.

    Ah, here's a neat article from Sci Am in 1989 (probably the one I read which caused me to seek it out in 1991): http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/472_html/Intro/Tin kertoyComputer/TinkerToy.html [rutgers.edu]

    For the impatient, there is a photo on the last page.
  • Samuel Johnson [amazon.com] remarked "(It) is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well [wikipedia.org]; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

    I remember a 1980 or 1981 tv news story from the University of Illinois where a robot "solved" Rubik's Cube -- early on in the phenomena -- in just over 15 minutes.

    The press paid attention to the WHO and the WHEN rather than the WHAT and HOW of the story. Color recognition from the camera and the mechanics were the real issue:
    The computer used had actually solved

    • Well, show me a dog walking on its hind legs and solving a Rubik's cube in under 15 seconds and I might be slightly more impressed.
  • what happenes when you put two robotic Tic-Tac-Toe-Playing LEGO robots together?
    • simple - IF the AI isn't complete crap than there will never be a winner... always draw... might remember you to the movie "wargames"... ^^
  • I was taught to code the AI of a tic-tac-toe game using the Minimax Algorithm [wikipedia.org] when I was in school. This is a simple yet good example of creating artificial intelligence, which I believe many programming beginners can adopt and make their very first AI enabled game.

    In this story, the game is played with a real board. That is the hard part.
    • and that isn't even new - as someone else pointed out: this has been done with lego mindstorm for connect four... same problem, but needs a more complex AI
  • at 2007 science fairs 4H competitions everywhere.

    This shouldn't be too daunting. I seem to remember BASIC programs for tic-tac-toe in '80s training manuals. Tie in the response to pickup and placement. The various options for input is where the challenge lies.
  • The software behind the Lego NXT is the same software behind much embedded computing design: LabView by National Instruments (http://www.ni.com). At the recent NI Week User Group Meeting in Austin, they announced a new toolkit for Mindstorm NXT that will be released in December, which will allow Labview users to work with the robots directly and do many more powerful things with them. This is a very worthy endeavor, since National Instruments is putting much of the profit back into the Mindstorm Consortium

  • Haven't folks already programmed LEGO bots to play connect four [google.com]? Some can even beat kids who play against them.

    OTOH tic tac toe has almost no complexity, so what's the big deal?

  • some image recognition, an AI that is VERY simple and the output through drawing... big deal

    a word on the AI: lesson 1 in artificial intelligence courses are minmax algorithms and since tic-tac-toe is a game with a VERY small game-graph (less than 20000 nodes) it is easy to calculate the best move even by brute-force (a 40 MHz CPU does this in about 1 second) so this is a story that is REALLY REALLY REALLY not worth telling

    slownewsday i'd say... let's see the news about IE7 RC1... THERE will be some f
  • This robot is awesome, do you know that it's build just with standard Lego Mindstorms NXT for $250? And comments are really boring.
  • Can you play tic tac toe with it over the 'net?

    In a similar fasion that you can drive my LEGO Mindstorms NXT robot over the 'net with live camera?

    http://turbogfx.homelinux.org/legocam [homelinux.org] ;)
  • I was at Brickfest and played with this robot in person. It was actually a very cool system he had set up. The game also had 3 levels of play.
  • I got beat at t-t-t by a chicken at a petting zoo (Bushkill Falls, Poconos PA.) Every time. I never played it again.

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