<P> Players soon discover that the best play from both parties leads to a draw . Hence, tic - tac - toe is most often played by young children . </P> <P> Because of the simplicity of tic - tac - toe, it is often used as a pedagogical tool for teaching the concepts of good sportsmanship and the branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the searching of game trees . It is straightforward to write a computer program to play tic - tac - toe perfectly, to enumerate the 765 essentially different positions (the state space complexity), or the 26,830 possible games up to rotations and reflections (the game tree complexity) on this space . </P> <P> The game can be generalized to an m, n, k - game in which two players alternate placing stones of their own color on an m × n board, with the goal of getting k of their own color in a row . Tic - tac - toe is the (3, 3, 3) - game . Harary's generalized tic - tac - toe is an even broader generalization of tic tac toe . It can also be generalized as a n game . Tic - tac - toe is the game where n equals 3 and d equals 2 . If played properly, the game will end in a draw making tic - tac - toe a futile game . </P> <P> Games played on three - in - a-row boards can be traced back to ancient Egypt, where such game boards have been found on roofing tiles dating from around 1300 BCE . </P>

What's it called when no one wins tic tac toe