Qubic
Encyclopedia
Qubic is the brand name of a four-in-a-row game
Game
A game is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements...

 played in a 4×4×4 matrix sold by Parker Brothers
Parker Brothers
Parker Brothers is a toy and game manufacturer and brand. Since 1883, the company has published more than 1,800 games; among their best known products are Monopoly, Cluedo , Sorry, Risk, Trivial Pursuit, Ouija, Aggravation, and Probe...

 starting in 1953. http://www.uspto.gov The original box, and the 1972 reissue, described the game as "Parker Brothers 3D Tic Tac Toe Game." Players take turn placing pieces to get four in a row horizontally or diagonally on a single board—or vertically in a column or diagonal line across four boards.

The four boards were made of clear plastic (in a simple square design in the original release and in a funkier design for the 1972 reissue) with circular playing pieces that resembled small poker chips in red, blue, and yellow; each player used a single color. Markers could be placed in any unoccupied position, rather than stacked in a pile on a square as in Score Four
Score Four
Score Four is a 3-D version of the abstract strategy game Connect Four. It was first sold under the name "Score Four" by Funtastic in 1968. Lakeside issued 4 different versions in the 1970's. Later Hasbro sold the game as "Connect Four Advanced" in the UK. .The object of Score Four is to position...

. The game is no longer manufactured.

Either two or three players could participate in a game. In two-person play, the first player will win if there are two optimal players. There are 76 winning lines. The 16 positions lying at the 4 space diagonals (8 corners and 8 internal positions) are equivalent and each involved in 7 winning lines; the other 48 positions (24 face positions and 24 edge positions) are also equivalent, each being involved in four winning lines. (The equivalence of a corner and an internal position is via an inversion; likewise for a face and an edge position.) The game was weakly solved by Eugene Mahalko in 1976, Oren Patashnik
Oren Patashnik
Oren Patashnik is a computer scientist. He is notable for co-creating BibTeX, and co-writing Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science...

 in 1980 and then solved again by Victor Allis
Victor Allis
Louis Victor Allis is a Dutch computer scientist working in the artificial intelligence field. In his graduate work, he revealed AI solutions for Connect Four, Qubic, and Gomoku. His dissertation introduced two new game search techniques: proof-number search and dependency-based search...

 using proof-number search
Proof-number search
Proof-number search is a game tree search algorithm invented by Victor Allis, with applications mostly in endgame solvers, but also for sub-goals during games....

. A plotter based 3D computer game was written by Arthur Hu and Carl Hu in 1975 on a HP 9830
HP 9830
The HP 9800 was a family of what were initially called programmable calculators and later desktop computers made by Hewlett-Packard, replacing their first HP 9100 calculator...

 in Lindbergh High School
Lindbergh Senior High School (Renton, Washington)
Lindbergh High School is a high school located in the southeastern section of Renton, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, in the Renton School District. Named after Charles A. Lindbergh, the famous aviator who was first to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1927, the school was founded in 1972....

 . It used four stacked trapezoids. It was later ported to the HP 2647
HP 2640
The HP 2640A and other HP 264X models were block-mode "smart" and intelligent ASCII standard serial terminals produced by Hewlett Packard using the Intel 8008 and 8080 microprocessors.-History:...

 demo tape with a graphical interface, using a simple mathematical transform to solve for 3D input position. It also was included in the Microsoft Windows Entertainment Pack in the 1990s as part of TicTactics.

Fool's Mate strategy

The cube structure makes the 8 corner-points and 8 centre-points extremely important; each of these is a member of 6 planes [flat, 2xvertical, 2xdiagonal-vertical, 1xcross-vertical) of 16 points. O places his first peg A on one of the 16 powerpoints provided that X does not place his peg at a powerpoint then the second B on one of the 5 available powerpoints; the third peg C goes on one of the three available planes which include A & B. X cannot block all these options. Once A,B & C are placed there is a forced win after a further 5 pegs.

|.A...x3....3....B

|.1....5.....2....w

|x1...x2....4.....

|.C........x4....w
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