Building Tic Tac Toe and Scraping with Ruby
16 Dec 2018
I have been working to finish the Tic Tac Toe program and transition to building the scraping tool to wrap up the section on Object Oriented Ruby. I have the Tic Tac Toe program passing all the tests, but I am trying to improve the computer’s ability to play the game to a level beyond outputting random integers to select available spaces on the game board. I guess colloquially one would refer to the computer player as a form of artificial intelligence. However, I have been trying to refrain from thinking about or using that term because it seems to have become a meme for lack of a better word to describe anything with a decision tree as AI, which, to me at least, has always seemed to carry a greater weight in terms of its significance.
In any case, that is my current goal and once I figure that out, I will be able to continue with scraping, which has been challenging. I am struggling to understand how to use the Nokogiri gem, but I am excited to have a project idea in mind. One of my main motivations for wanting to learn web development is to have the ability to create tools I want to use and want to share with others to use, particularly at work. In my field, I work with the state government, which provides information on their website for the publc to use. However, the website is dated and the data cannot be accessed easily. I want to scrape the website and create a better way for people to access that data. I am hopeful I can receive approval for the project and create something I and others will ultimately use each day.