Hey all,
I read the meta, and I realize this question might be pretty elementary for this site, but I'm having trouble computing this, and I know it won't take too much insight for someone to give me an approximation.
Say I have a 5x5x5 tic-tac-toe board (noughts and crosses), where each of the 125 spaces on the cube can belong to one of 3 different classes (X, O, empty). Now obviously the naive observation is that there are 3^125 possible 'boards', but after taking the following eliminating criteria in mind, can someone please give me a general idea of the order of the space complexity?
--EDITED TO ADDRESS #3--
- Eliminate duplicate boards (equivalent after rotation, reflection)
- Eliminate all boards that are not valid 'game boards'. That is, eliminate all boards where there is 5-in-a-row of one class (excluding the 'empty' class) in either horizontal, vertical, or diagonal directions, in all dimensions.
- Similar to (2), but going one step further and eliminating all boards where there 4 in a row in any direction/dimension and that four in a row can possibly lead to a win. So exclude all boards that contain at least one row, column, or diagonal with 4 of one class, and the 5th being empty.
- Because TTT (N&C) is a turn-based, ZS game, we should also eliminate possible boards where the difference in classes is greater than one.
As mentioned above, I'm certainly not looking for any kind of precise number, just looking for a broad estimate. I've tried determining this for 2-dimensional boards and simple 3-dimensional boards, but I'm quite unsure of how these would scale to 5x5x5.
Thanks in advance for the help, this has been gnawing at me for a few days now.