- Qubic
Qubic is the brand name of a four-in-a-row
game played in a 4×4×4 matrix sold byParker Brothers in the late 1960s. The original box, and the 1972 reissue, described the game as "Parker Brothers 3D Tic Tac Toe Game." Players take turn placing pieces to get four in a row horizontally or diagonally on a single board -- or vertically in a column or diagonal line across four boards.The four boards were made of clear plastic (in a simple square design in the original release and in a funkier design for the 1972 reissue) with circular playing pieces that resembled small poker chips in red, blue, and yellow; each player used a single color. Markers could be placed in any unoccupied position, rather than stacked in a pile on a square as in
Score Four . The game is no longer manufactured.Either two or three players could participate in a game. In two-person play, the first player will win if there are two optimal players. There are 76 winning lines. It was weakly solved by Eugene Mahalko in 1976,
Oren Patashnik in 1980 and then solved again byVictor Allis usingproof-number search . A plotter based 3D computer game was written byArthur Hu andCarl Hu in 1975 on aHP 9830 in Lindbergh High School . It used 4 stacked trapezoids. It was later ported to the HP 2647 demo tape with a graphical interface, using a simple mathematical transform to solve for 3D input position. It also was included in the MicrosoftWindows Entertainment Pack in the 1990s as part of "TicTactics ".See also
*
Tic Tac Toe
*Score Four
*3-D Tic-Tac-Toe (Atari 2600) References
* Eugene D. Mahalko, A Possible Win Strategy for the Game of Qubic, Computer Science Master's Thesis, Brigham Young University, 1976
* Oren Patashnik, Qubic: 4 x 4 x 4 Tic-Tac-Toe, Mathematical Magazine 53 (1980) 202216
* L.V. Allis, P.N.A. Schoo, Qubic solved again, in: H.J. van den Herik, L.V. Allis (Eds.), Heuristic Programming in Artificial Intelligence 3: The Third Computer Olympiad. Ellis Horwood, Chichester, 1992, pp. 192-204.External links
* [http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/13714 Qubic] at
BoardGameGeek
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