Fets and Crosses: Tic-Tac-Toe built from 2458 discrete transistors

A Work of art. I remember my dad building a computer using discrete TTL chips in our garage in Auckland. He took like two years and I'm guessing about five people saw it. I would love to see more of these on HN, but most don't get past a few upvotes in the sea of AI stuff.

Sweet. About the same number of transistors used in the Intel 4004.

vaguely related: MENACE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_and_...

That's a lot of transistors. Why do I feel it could be done in less? This is the absolute minimum number of Discrete transistors you need?

Would standard HDL synthesis engines be better at this in terms of schematic capture? They could do optimizations that I think if I'm reading right weren't done here