Tic-tac-toe, also called noughts and crosses and many other names, is a pen-and-paper game for two players, O and X, who take turns to mark the spaces in a 3Ã?3 grid. The player who succeeds in placing three of their own marks in a horizontal, vertical or diagonal row wins the game. This game is won by the first player, X: This is a "cat's game", that is, it is drawn: Players soon discover that best play leads to a draw, regardless of where the first player plays. So tic-tac-toe is most often played by very young children; when they have discovered an unbeatable strategy they move on to more sophisticated games such as dots and boxes. This reputation for ease has led to casinos offering gamblers the chance to play tic-tac-toe against trained chickens [1], [2]. The first two ply of the game tree for tic-tac-toe.The simplicity of tic-tac-toe makes it ideal as a pedagogical tool for teaching the concepts of game theory 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 (the game tree complexity) on this space. Ignoring symmetry, there are 255,168 possible games. The first known computer game, OXO (or Noughts and Crosses, 1952) for the EDSAC computer played perfect games of tic-tac-toe against a human opponent. One example of a Tic-Tac-Toe playing computer is the Tinkertoy computer, developed by MIT students, and made out of Tinker Toys. It only plays Tic-Tac-Toe, and has never lost a game. It is currently on display at the Museum of Science, Boston.

tic tac toe is one of many names. The meaning of those words are quite simple. If you win an tic tac toe, you have 3 boxes in a row with your mark in it. Then to show how you won you tab the boxes, and ones there was a guy that said: look tic, tac, toe! and that stuck

"The name tic tac toe comes from a game by the same name, no longer played, in which players with their eyes closed tossed a pencil down onto a slate marked with numbers, and earned the score the number indicated--something like blind darts. The game dates to the mid- to late 1800s. "Ticktack," according to the Random House Dictionary of English language, is a repetitive sound made by repetitive tapping, knocking or clicking. Thus, "tic tac toe" is an imitation of the sound the pencil makes when hitting the slate." Source and further information: http://www.ehow.com/about_4682851_origin-name-tic-tac-toe.html