A group of researchers have written a study about the role of psychology in winning a game of rock-paper-scissor.
The study was posted on the website arXiv.org that is run by Cornell University.
Researchers took 360 students, put them into 50 groups of six players, and made them play 300 rounds of the game in random pairings. To encourage the students to win, the researchers offered them a small amount of money each time they won a round.
The students were then observed as to how they rotated through the three play options after they won or lost, and were able to determine an interesting pattern to the simple game.
They found that after winning one round, the student tended to stick with the same action for the next, whereas after losing a round, a student switched to another strategy.
The findings demonstrate "collective cyclic motions" and "conditioned response" in the winners, which differs from previous notions of classical game theory or mixed strategy Nash equilibrium, in which every player "chooses the three actions with equal probability," according to the study.
If a player wins with by using scissors against paper, their opponent will likely choose rock next, making paper the winning move. After losing by choosing paper against scissors, the best odds come from selecting what would beat the opponent's last choice, which in this case would be rock.
A robot player at the University of Tokyo reportedly has a perfect record at the game. The mechanical player is able to recognize a human player's move within a millisecond of seeing the hand, giving it the upper hand.
The game Rock- paper-scissor is an age-old Chinese children's game, which can be dated back to almost 2,000 years ago.
It was formerly known as the "Hand command", the game has gone through a number of modifications since first being introduced.
By the early 20th century, the game became popular in places like the United States and Europe. It became so popular that in 1932, the New York Times dedicated an entire article to explain the rules of the game in detail.
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