This blog post is an update on my work-in-progress Tic-tac-toe game, being written in Swift. The source code is available on GitHub:

https://github.com/ijoshsmith/swift-tic-tac-toe

I’ve reached the first major milestone. The program is capable of playing Tic-tac-toe against itself, although there is not yet an intelligent agent deciding where to put each mark on the game board.  Instead, the program has what I call a “scripted strategy” which unit test methods use to advance a game to completion.

Before we get into how that works, here’s a mile-high view of the classes involved so far.

GameBoard is the data model which stores each mark a player puts on the board.

Game orchestrates gameplay between two players.

OutcomeAnalyst is what Game uses to detect when a game is over.

Player represents a contestant, either human or computer.

TicTacToeStrategy describes an object Player uses to choose where to put a mark.

So far the only class which adopts the TicTacToeStrategy protocol is for testing purposes, named ScriptedStrategy.

One interesting thing about this class is that it supports a tiny domain-specific language. As seen in the following example from GameTests (slightly modified to fit this blog’s layout), a ScriptedStrategy is created for each player by parsing a text diagram of a Tic-tac-toe board showing where each Player should put its marks.

Up next I will work on the algorithmic strategy, so that the app’s user will have a challenging opponent to play against. This is a lot of fun!

Next article: Creating Tic-tac-toe in Swift: Artificial Intelligence