Rock Paper Scissors Study.

The problem of how to win at Rock Paper Scissors has, believe it or not, overwhelmed mathematicians and game theorists for a very long time. While they formerly had invented a theoretical answer to the question, an experiment by Zhijian Wang at Zhejiang University in China that made use of real players has discovered an exciting crinkle to the original theory.

The recreation area game of Rock Paper Scissors may not appear like one in which players take a scientific approach. However, that is precisely what three Chinese scientists revealed. Since these disclosures, their findings were circulated in a research paper that won them a Best of 2014 by MIT Technology Review. The article was also published at the esteemed Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Zhou Haijun is part of the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Science. Wang Zhijian and Xu Bin of the Experimental Social Science Laboratory at Zhejiang University wrote a paper titled Social Cycling and Conditional Responses in the Rock Paper Scissors Game.

According to a statement released by Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, this was the first time Chinese scientists would win this prize in the social science realm. And the publication was worth it because it revealed a pattern of choices players make during the RPS game.

According to the article published by Zhijian, the Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS) game is a commonly used model system in game theory. Evolutionary game theory forecasts the existence of obstinate cycles in the evolutionary paths of the game. The article further claimed that the experimental evidence has remained to be feeble.

In the experiment, Zhijian observed that winning players have a habit of sticking with their winning tactic. In contrast, losers have a tendency to switch to the next line of attack in the sequence of rock paper scissors, following what he calls “persistent cyclic flows.”

Okay, enough of the terms; let’ get into what the article was really all about. Here’s how it works in the run-through: Player A and Player B both start using unplanned methods. If Player A goes ahead to use Rock and Player B throws Paper, Player A is defeated. In the succeeding round, Player A can take on the mindset that Player B will use Paper again and should, for that reason, use Scissors to beat the opponent. In the next round, because Player B was defeated, Player A can assume that Player B will use the subsequent strategy in the sequence – Scissors – and then Player A should then use Rock, thus winning again.

If you take the game on a theoretic level, the most statistically right way to play Rock Paper Scissors is by picking your approach at random. Now, since there are three possible outcomes – a loss, a win, or a tie – and each approach has at least one strategy that would easily defeat it and another strategy that the throw can defeat. Well, for the experiment, the strategy that a player wins with is not the concern. Nonetheless, it makes more sense to pick Rock exactly one-third of the time, Scissors one-third of the time, and Paper one-third of the time. And this is called the Rock Paper Scissors’ Nash equilibrium.

Even with the Nash Equilibrium presenting the best strategy for a real-life Rock Paper Scissors game, Zhijian, in his study, found an absolutely different pattern when he and two other researchers enrolled about seventy-two students to play the game. The group of researchers divided the students into twelve groups of six players and had them each play about three rounds of Rock Paper Scissors against each other. Yup, I know precisely what you are thinking, but this experiment needed lots of practice to give a theory. Zhijian also added some expenses in ratio to the number of victories.

When Zhijian reviewed the outcomes, he discovered that students selected each strategy close to one-third of the time, and thus proposing the Nash Equilibrium theory. Nonetheless, when he looked closer, he noted a more irregular pattern.

In this pattern that Zhijian found, winners were repeating their strategy, and losers kept moving to the next strategy in the sequence. This discovery, the group of researchers called a ‘conditional response’ in game theory. The researchers have theorized that the reaction may be hard-wired into the brain, an inquiry they may have to study with further necessary experiments.

As of now, Zhijian recommends that exploiting the knowledge that most players use the conditional tactics that may result in winning so many games in the Rock Paper Scissors.

To win the RPS game, players need to pay attention to the action their opponent just engaged in or the throw they made. Then they can quickly estimate how their opponents will act in subsequent throws and make the hand gesture that would beat their opponent’s move.

Assuming a player wins by playing Rock, he is very likely to play Rock again in the next round, and this, according to Zhijian, has to do with the way the brain works. But if he is defeated, he will most likely shift to Paper in the next round.

According to MIT Technology Review, this game theory is known as a conditional response and has never been revealed before in game experiments.

Nevertheless, if the game Rock Paper Scissors were played by arbitrary number generators or robots, then the chances of forecasts an order for a good win in the game would have been so little no one would bother studying it. This is because each robotic player would aimlessly throw out one of the three signs, and over long enough sample sizes, and then, the games would be equally split between wins for player A, wins for player B, and ties making it a non-exciting game to see.

Thankfully, Rock Paper Scissors is hardly ever played by robots. Most of the time, it is played by humans that work emotionally and sometimes irrationally. The study carried out at Zhejiang University was not only a fantastic work, but it is also a good development for humanity.