Harder Drives: Storing data on Tic Tac Toe

07 Jun 2022


There is an amazing video by tom7 about Harder Drives, a form of storage that's very silly but proves a point. Anything can store data.

In the video, he succesfully stores data in ICMP echo requests and NES Tetris.

I put some thinking into it and realised that Tic Tac Toe can store two bits in four states: draw, unfinished, X win and O win.

It's an interesting concept, allowing you to store as many bits of data as you can cram TTT boards into one piece of paper.

However there's one great way to improve it, O is 0 and X is 1. which allows you to store 9 bits of data per board, we could use one bit as parity to check if it's odd or even; very good idea.

O for odd on parity, X for even on parity

O|X|O
-+-+-
X|X|X
-+-+-
X|X|O

01011101 = 93, it's an odd number so the parity bit is set to O

If we say that the average TTT board is 3cmx3cm, an A4 piece of paper is 623.7cm squared and 3x3 is 9cm2 which means 623.7/9 is 69.3 which means you can store 69 bytes on one side of A4 paper.

Yes, this is a meme, but it can also be serious. make it please. i wanna laugh.


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