Once you know the secret, you’ll be king of rock-paper-scissors, which is probably a good thing, maybe?
Einstein apparently once said that the definition of insanity is repeating the same action and expecting a different result. While that makes a good soundbite, it apparently doesn’t hold true when it comes to the classic game of ‘rock-paper-scissors’.
A tournament organised at Zhejiang University in China has reveled that there is a pattern to the way that the majority of people play rock-paper-scissors, and anticipating their moves using this pattern could help you to get the win, allowing you to be the undefeated champion of RPS, as the pros call it.
According to The BBC, the conventional wisdom is that your chances of winning are one in three, and to maximise those chances, classical game theory suggests that you should completely randomise your choices, making it equally probable that you’ll choose any one of the three. Doing so is known as the Nash equilibrium, named after John Forbes Nash Jr, of A Beautiful Mind fame.
However, that’s not how people tend to play, according to the results of the research. Scientists recruited 360 students, divided them into groups and had each of them play 300 rounds, which is a fair aul arm workout, we imagine. What the results showed were that winners tended to stick to the same selection that had given them a win more often than the others, while losers seemed to switch automatically after they’d been beaten.
This is apparently known in game theory as a “conditional response”, where if you’ve won you stay, and if you’ve lost you shift to the next option, but in a particular order. Which order? Well, the order that follows the name of the game, which isn’t very imaginative we must admit.
So for example, if you get beaten by choosing rock, this new discovery suggests that you are more likely to switch to paper in the next round. Knowing that can help you predict your opponent’s move and be unbeatable, but it also highlights that automatically switching because you lost is not the best idea either.
While RPS is pretty important, apparently the underlying psychology of the game is interesting for scientists, who plan to analyse the behaviour that leads to people acting this way in competition. However, we’re going to spend the rest of the day in JOE towers testing this out, as we have our suspicions about it…
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