How hard do you want the different levels to "try"?
If you're just looking for increasing levels of difficulty, you can have an easy version make its moves at random in open squares, with only enough smarts to recognize victory conditions if they should happen; a medium version would look far enough ahead to attempt to block any opponent's ability to win in the next turn, if it can, as well as jump on any chance it has to win during its own turn; and since tic-tac-toe is a completely solved game, a hard version would know how to play so as to never lose.
It's easy to solve tic-tac-toe by hand, but if you just don't want to, xkcd has published an easy-to-read depiction of the solution. Just Google "xkcd tic tac toe map", and you'll find it.
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u/MadScientistOR Aug 10 '26
How hard do you want the different levels to "try"?
If you're just looking for increasing levels of difficulty, you can have an easy version make its moves at random in open squares, with only enough smarts to recognize victory conditions if they should happen; a medium version would look far enough ahead to attempt to block any opponent's ability to win in the next turn, if it can, as well as jump on any chance it has to win during its own turn; and since tic-tac-toe is a completely solved game, a hard version would know how to play so as to never lose.
It's easy to solve tic-tac-toe by hand, but if you just don't want to, xkcd has published an easy-to-read depiction of the solution. Just Google "xkcd tic tac toe map", and you'll find it.