[Tutor] programming tic tac toe

[Alan Gauld]

"Ark" <cloudneozero at gmail.com> wrote

> I used a list (with lists inside) to represent the board.  And to 
> identify a
> winning line I used many if's, like this one:
> def line(board):
>    if board[0][0] == board[1][1] == board[2][2]:
>        return True

> I did not like using all those if's, and I would like to hear 
> suggestions to
> find a line in the board, maybe a more  intelligent approach.

Given that there are always 3x3 cells on an oxo board and
therefore only 8 possible winning lines hard coding is probably
a reasonable approach. You could make it into a single boolean
condition which would be slightly less typing and slightly faster
but otherwise what you have is fine I think:

def line(board):
    return  board[0][0] == board[0][1] == board[0][2] or
              board[1][0] == board[1][1] == board[1][2] or
              ...
              board[2][0] == board[1][1] == board[[0][2]

But I'm not sure its that much nicer! :-)

For the more general case of an NxN board then you
should probably consider using a loop and relative
indexing but for 3x3 hard coded is better IMHO.

-- 
Alan Gauld
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld