This Robot Arm Will Beat (or Tie) You in Tic-Tac-Toe Every Time

Tic-tac-toe is a game that perhaps you haven’t played since you were a kid. There are harder games out there, but with a limited number of moves, it seems like an ideal one for robots — at least easier than chess or Go.

Greg Flurry recently built his own robotic tic-tac-toe player that will, frustratingly, win or tie a competitor every time. It uses a four-axis robotic arm that can move markers to the correct place on a grid.

Control for this device is accomplished with two Raspberry Pis— one to run a camera on top of a tower and another for the user interface — as well as a MacBook Pro for overall coordination and arm manipulation.

Though the arm works slowly, it’s quite an accomplishment to get something like this to work in practice, especially since is uses a camera to sense game piece location.

You can check out the project in its entirety here, and see a demo of it below!