Four-dimensional noughts and crosses
Tuesday, March 10th, 2026 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manWhen I was an undergraduate someone introduced me to the game of four-dimensional noughts and crosses. Of course, it's impossible to construct a four-dimensional board, but in the same way that you could represent the layout of a Rubik's cube on paper as three 3×3 grids stacked on top of each other, you could represent a 4×4×4×4 tesseract as four cubes stacked onto each other in the fourth dimension, each of which can then be taken apart in the same way, such that you end up with a 4×4 grid of 4×4 grids.
This turns out to be, unsurprisingly, several steps up in complexity from the conventional game, and lots of fun. It was a pain to have to draw the board each time, but eventually I printed it out, and used washers with Tipp-Ex on one side as the game pieces, a solution which lasted until my bag ripped open in the hold of a flight, and the games set my washers and board were in was lost.
For years I've been vaguely considering writing a computerised version, but was put off by how much of my limited free time it would take. (That's limited, as in parent-of-a-small-child.) Recently, though, it occurred to me I could delegate the donkey work to an LLM, and here's the result.
There's two player and single player versions. The two-player version is for two players at a single computer, tablet, etc; it's not enabled for communication via the Internet.
Since it can not always be obvious when a winning line is formed across multiple dimensions that it is actually a straight line, the game will rearrange the projection when the winning line is not within a single grid to show it within such a grid. You can always switch back to the original view with a "Toggle presentation" button.
Have fun playing!
This turns out to be, unsurprisingly, several steps up in complexity from the conventional game, and lots of fun. It was a pain to have to draw the board each time, but eventually I printed it out, and used washers with Tipp-Ex on one side as the game pieces, a solution which lasted until my bag ripped open in the hold of a flight, and the games set my washers and board were in was lost.
For years I've been vaguely considering writing a computerised version, but was put off by how much of my limited free time it would take. (That's limited, as in parent-of-a-small-child.) Recently, though, it occurred to me I could delegate the donkey work to an LLM, and here's the result.
There's two player and single player versions. The two-player version is for two players at a single computer, tablet, etc; it's not enabled for communication via the Internet.
Since it can not always be obvious when a winning line is formed across multiple dimensions that it is actually a straight line, the game will rearrange the projection when the winning line is not within a single grid to show it within such a grid. You can always switch back to the original view with a "Toggle presentation" button.
Have fun playing!
