Recursively Generate Every Tic-Tac-Toe game in Python

Question

I am working on a project where I generate every possible tic-tac-toe array. As a proof of concept, I am working on code to fill an array with 9 subarrays. Each subarray will have two values, the first one being 0 or 1 (for x and o respectively), and the second one being from 1 to 9 (representing when it was placed). An example of an array I would like to get out would look like:

[[0, 0], [1, 1], [0, 2], [1, 3], [0, 4], [1, 5], [0, 6], [1, 7], [0, 8]]

I have already written code, using 9 for loops, each one nested in the one above, which gives me the desired results (every possible array, and each one unique). But I am trying to write code, using recursion, and avoiding writing tons of nested loops.

When I run the code below, it is only able to generate the array above, and cannot create other combinations. My code is below:

print("running...")

allGames = []
checkCurrentGame = [5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5]
stepsDown = 0

def cleanGame(move, currentGame):
    for j in range(9):
        if (currentGame[j][1] >= move):
            currentGame[j] = [5, 0]

def completeMove(moveNumber, currentGame):
    global stepsDown
    stepsDown = stepsDown + 1
    for i in range(9):
        cleanGame(moveNumber, currentGame)
        if (currentGame[i][0] == 5):
            currentGame[i][0] = i % 2
            currentGame[i][1] = moveNumber
            allGames.append(currentGame)
            break
    if (stepsDown < 9):
        generateGame(currentGame)

def generateGame(currentGame):
    for i in range(9):
        completeMove(i, currentGame)

generateGame([[5, 0], [5, 0], [5, 0], [5, 0], [5, 0], [5, 0], [5, 0], [5, 0], [5, 0]])

for x in range(len(allGames)):
    print(allGames[x])

Answer 1

If I understand your question correctly this should do, however this is not recursion -

import itertools
[zip(p, range(0, 9)) for p in itertools.product([0, 1], repeat=9)]

The code first generates a board (9 0's or 1's) -

itertools.product([0, 1], repeat=9)

and then add the index data to it.

I recommend having a look in itertools