Creating Tic Tac Tableau Part 1: Generating the Data

• By Joshua Milligan
• Posted in All, Pushing the Limits
• On July 4, 2014
• 7 Comments.

Once I had the idea of creating a dashboard to play Tic Tac Toe against Tableau, I had to come up with a way. I knew I wanted to use actions in a dashboard – and that meant I’d need dimensions to pass as filters. That meant I’d need to have data at the level of a space on the board. There are nine spaces. But I’d also need to have every possible move so that clicking on a square could send an action filter specific to a given board. So I’d need every possible board. This is more than just the possible outcomes of the game – in fact, even more important, I’d need every possible board of every possible game at every possible state: Win, Draw or In Progress.

I’ve never seen such a data set. So, I set out to create one. I wrote an application in C# to generate the data as flat files. I subsequently imported the data into SQL Server so I could manipulate it as needed. I won’t go into the code (you can download it here), but here’s an illustration of the recursive process it used to play through every possible game:

Notice that every board has 9 records of data, one for each space – even empty spaces. In fact, especially empty spaces as those are the ones that will eventually trigger the action filters they must be in the data.

Starting with an empty board, the application placed an X in the first available spot (board 2), then an O in the next (board 3), then an X in the next (board 4), and so on. At every point, the application checked to see if the game was a final outcome (X Win, O Win, or Draw) and if so would stop, go back to the previous board and try the next possible play. Notice that board 8 is an X win. Board 9 then is a continuation of board 7 with the next possible X move.

When I first wrote the application, I had no idea how many iterations it would take (I’m sure I could have calculated it), how long it would run, whether it would consume all my memory and blow up, or how many records it would create. It actually worked very well, going through every possibility and writing the data out in a matter of seconds. I was excited…

…but then I opened the file and did a record count. My heart sank…

Although I only had 549,946 possible boards – each of those boards had 9 spaces or squares. That meant I had nearly 5 million records of data. That’s not too much for Tableau at all. I work with many times that amount of data every day. In fact, you can download the full data here as an extract in a packaged workbook.

But it is over the 1,000,000 record limit for Tableau Public! And I wanted to share Tic Tac Toe with the world.

So…

…I got creative. I’ll show you how in Part 2.