Code TicTacToe in Tkinter - pt. 3! Program a Computer AI opponent in Python for a playable GUI game!

what's going on you guys welcome back to the channel let's redo that what's going on you guys welcome back to the channel today's video is going to be a continuation in our building graphical user interfaces in python with kinter or t kinter and if you haven't been following along so far what we've built out thus far is just kind of the shell of what will be a tic-tac-toe game we built it to where the user can select whether they're going to be x's or o's and they can take their turn but we haven't built out any sort of ai computer taking a turn back at you yet and obviously we haven't spent a lot of time making it aesthetically pleasing that's because we want it to be a functional game before we worry too much about it looking pretty so today we're going to get into how to create that ai opponent but before we get too into it if you have been finding this or anything else on the channel useful i really appreciate it subscribe to the channel and a like on the video helps me out a ton as i get started here and without any further ado let's go ahead and take a look at how we're going to do this so first thing is we have to build a turn-based system right something that's going to track whether it's your turn or the computer's turn so i'm gonna create a new variable and i'm gonna call it turn and i'll start it at one you could start at zero i'm gonna kind of consider the player one in the computer zero and so when the game starts i want the player to move first so i'm gonna set it equal to one and then i also want a variable called turns that's going to be the total number of turns that have been taken and that's how i'm going to track whether the game is over or not because obviously in tic-tac-toe you go until the game board has been filled so when that gets to nine um we're going to stop letting the player or the ai make a mega turn so then just like we had player character we're going to want to create another variable and we'll call it a i character and obviously anywhere we define the player character we're going to want to come in and just define the opposite character as the ai character and if you think about how we're drawing the buttons um it should make sense that we need both of these because we have to when a a the player or the computer take a turn we have to be able to update the button with whatever text that player had so we need to track both of these it's not enough to just track one okay so there we go we are saying when we select x for our player the ai is going to get o and when we select o the ai is going to get x and we define those as global so we can track them outside of the game and then what we want to do is come down and where it actually updates our table and draws the new button we actually want to make this conditional on the turn now being equal to zero and the total number of turns being less than nine right because when turn is equal to one it's the player's turn to go and when turns is less than nine total that means the game's not over yet so if both of those things are true then the player can do this but actually we want to um we want to add a conditional to this as well and only say if positions at position is equal to position is equal to this dash right that's our like default blank character that's the only time we want to actually let the player take a turn because now we have to deal with player trying to like overwrite where the computer played or where they already played so with both those conditions we should be handling the only time we actually want to let them update the screen and then what we also need to do here is we also need to say that's when the turn variable goes to zero so we're saying i just went and now it's your turn to go and because we are referencing a variable that's outside the function we need that to be a global and we'll also want to increment our turns counter so we'll want to get that in here as well so we're saying turns is now equal to zero or turns you add one to and turn is now equal to zero and this is when we'll this is when we'll call a function that we'll call a i turn okay so we're saying okay the player has just taken his turn now it's time for the computer to take their turn so let's go ahead and take a look at how we are going to define ai turn so just like in a player's turn i think we need to track turns and just turn as well so let's start there and let's see what do we want to do when the ai takes a turn well i think to start we could make a smart ai that's kind of checking for two in a row and looking to block that's going to take probably like a 40 minute video in its own right so today we'll just make it um random it's going to randomly select integers and as long as it's a blank space it'll take its turn there so it's kind of like playing a little kid in tic-tac-toe where they're just filling in spaces they don't really know why but we're going to build a simple ai for this one so now we're going to say while turn is equal to zero and turns is less than nine so this is pretty similar to what we just did for the player and while the turn is equal to zero and turns is less than nine let's make a local variable called ai select and we'll set it equal to um the function rand int and it's going to take that from zero to eight because those are the total positions right and rand int if you don't have the random module in your python file go ahead and say from random import rand int that's just letting us give it a range of integers to select a random variable from so now it's going to say if positions at that ai select variable we just grabbed if it's equal to just like in the player turn if it's equal to a dash that means it's blank and now we can go ahead and actually build out the logic to track um to track whether or not we can update it so we just said pick a random position in that table of positions and then as long as it's blank what are we going to do now we have to check what the position was because row and column needs two variables and that position is just one variable so we're going to go ahead and say if a i select and i'm actually going to grab all of our positional tracking code from here to tell us where what the rows and columns are because we already did this and all we have to do is say instead of if position at position we say if the value of a i select and so i'm going to just anywhere that we had position for the playerupdate function i'm going to replace with ai select because it was just the same it was passing one integer 0 through 8 into that function and then it was converting it to row and column information okay and so what we're doing now is we're just doing the same thing with an automatically generated computerized turn so this little ditty right here is going to convert all of our computers turns that are just coming in as one number it's going to convert into a row and column coordinate system and then once we've got our row and column data we're also going to steal the new button logic from uh from from down here and so we'll say okay ai turn now we've got our rows and columns and let's draw a new button again instead of position we're gonna pass in ai select but since we used the r and c same same syntax we can keep that but instead we're going to set turn equal to one now so we're passing it back to the player and then we're going to increment turns as well so that might do it the only thing is um we want to build in some reset code so once like the game is over um you should be able to just hit the start button and have everything clear out and have it reset so let's go ahead down into our draw board function because both of the start buttons call this draw board function and what we're going to do right when you call draw board we are going to reset it so that regardless of um what happened in the previous game turn is going to be equal to zero and that or turns is gonna be equal to zero and let's say turn is going to be equal to one and we'll put it back in the player's hands and then the positions make sure you're calling global positions but the positions table is going to reset to all blanks as well so once a game is done and the board is all filled out you just hit the start button and it should clear out so this was pretty quick i imagine we might run into some bugs when we run this but let's go ahead and see if we're playing against a computer now okay let's play as x start so i took my turn and it's letting me keep taking turns huh all right let's take a look at what's going on here okay sorry about the confusion i did some uh troubleshooting it took a few minutes here but uh what i realized just a stupid line uh that i forgot to do we checked to see if it's blank but we never actually update our positions table with the ai's character and so it thinks it's taking a turn but we never told it that it actually has to uh that it actually has to update our table of um who's gone where with the ai character so hopefully that clears things up i was printing out um like the what turn had been taken in the positions table and trying to figure out um why nothing was working but let's go ahead and run it now x start okay we see the ai's playing against us it is just random so you can see uh like they're they obviously weren't blocking us um when we got two in a row but uh we fill in the table it doesn't uh it doesn't crap out even though like right now the ai would see that it could be continuously running that um loop so let's see yeah and we can clear it out and we can restart it um again we'll handle wind conditions in the next video and we'll handle actually making it pretty once the game is functional and handles everything from start to winter to to reset and everything like that flawlessly but for this video we learned how to make an ai that we can actually play against and that's pretty cool so if you have any questions about what you saw in this video today or anything in particular you want to see in future videos be sure to let me know about in the comments below again if you've been finding this or anything on the channel useful i really appreciate a subscribe and a like on the video it helps me out a ton and as always good luck with your code and thanks for watching thanks bye