Neural Network and Machine Learning in a simple game

This post is about implementing a – quite basic – Neural Network that is able to play the game Tic-Tac-Toe. For sure there is not really a need for any Neural Network or Machine Learning model to implement a good – well, basically perfect – computer player for this game. This could be easily achieved by using a brute-force approach. But as this is the author's first excursion into the world of Machine Learning, opting for something simple seems to be a good idea. The motivation to start working on this post and the related project can be comprised in one word: AlphaGo. The game of Go is definitely the queen of competitive games.