By playing tic-tac-toe, Joshua/WOPR learned the lesson of futility: the only winning move is not to play, not to even begin, so the launch was shut down. He was behaving like a machine (which of course he/it is) and when the new bit of information was discovered and added to the scenario that was running, a new solution logically presented itself: don't begin, because all other scenarios result in total loss.
SPOILER
If you notice after the exhaustive round of tic-tac-toe, it had figured out the launch codes. (The shower of sparks and blown monitors were for dramatic purposes and wouldn't have affected the launch command.) As the silos were preparing, WOPR was applying the newly-learned lesson of futility it had discovered from tic-tac-toe to Global Thermonuclear War, and re-ran every possible scenario, after each of which it displayed "WINNER: NONE" indicating it had learned the correct lesson. "Strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
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wait for iiiiit...
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Catnip86
10 years ago
Which was actually the major problem of McCittrick's plan. The Russian missiles would annihilate us, the WOPR would decide "not to play" and do nothing. Russia wins.
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Doc80
9 years ago
Actually no because of what happens in the movie, they would switch back to the humans being in control of the missiles.
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Catnip86
9 years ago
But wouldn't it be too late? The humans were completely locked out in the movie.
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Doc80
9 years ago
No because after WOPR realizes that it's better to not play, the the humans would no longer be locked out and then some time later, they would go back to the old system.
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gabby_bm
9 years ago
If the radioactive cloud and the resulting thermonuclear winter from all those launched Russian missiles killed all the Russians as well, the result would still be "Winner:None" then it wouldn't really matter if Joshua played the game or not. Americans would be dead and so would the Russians.
My New Year's resolution is to simply write 2̶0̶1̶4̶ 2015 instead of 2014"
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