OXO

OXO (or Noughts and Crosses) is a player vs. computer Tic-tac-toe game which was written by Alexander S. Douglas in 1952 for the one-of-a-kind EDSAC computer at the University Of Cambridge. The single-player "game" was designed for academic purposes — Douglas used OXO on the famous EDSAC to study the "Interactions Between Human and Computer".

Like electronic Nim, electronic OXO wasn't designed to be entertaining.

OXO was the first digital graphical game to run on a computer, and was rather simple to use — the player played against the computer, with output displayed on the computer's 35×16-pixel cathode ray tube. The source code was short, yet played a perfect game of noughts and crosses.

The game didn't have widespread popularity, though, mainly because the EDSAC was a computer unique to Cambridge.

Not to be confused with the American dance-rock band of the same name active in the 1980s.


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