Eddie Randolph writes,
I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the World Rock Paper Scissors Contest currently being held. Do you think it will be won by someone who plays intuitively, or a master strategist? If you think the strategist will win, do you think they will employ strategies from the book you pointed to in your blog?
My reply: I love rock-paper-scissors but I’m afraid I have no deep theories. I’d guess that it’s pretty random, that whoever wins one year wouldn’t have much better than a random chance of doing well the next year.
I suspect that you are correct that human tournaments will be simple crap-shoots (random).
But machine tournaments are anything but random. See here for some details,
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsb-results1.htm…
and here
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsbpc.html
To respond in advance to those who point out the trivial fact that you can't beat a random player, this is true, but the fact is that a real tournament has many sub-optimal players. Therefore it will also have players who try to analyze the play of their opponent and who are therefore susceptible to gambits. If you use this fact, you, yourself, are susceptible to counter-gambits.
RPS thus encapsulates the bluffing and counter-bluffing strategies of games like Poker without all of the extraneous aspects like complicated rules. As such, it provides a very interesting test bed for game playing strategies.