Winning at Rock Paper Scissors - Numberphile

HANNAH FRY: So today we're going to talk about rock-paper-scissors

and I reckon everyone knows how to play it

Scissors beats paper, paper covers rock, rock blunts scissors, so three--

BRADY: Wait, I always thought it smashed them? Dr. FRY: Oh, I thought it blunts them

Actually, if anything, it would probably sharpen them, right?

There are three strategies, each one of them loses once and wins once

So it looks like there's no strategy that you can play to win, but I'm going to show you

about a new paper that had just come out where it gives you some top tips of how to win

So it's a group of Chinese scientists, where they run an experiment

where they got 360 students to play games of rock-paper-scissors with one another

300 rounds in every game, which took up to 2 hours,

which is astonishing, students playing rock-paper-scissors for 2 hours

Okay, so normally if you have rock-paper-scissors

and some of you had rock (R) up there, and rock is beaten by paper (P), which is then beaten by scissors (S)

So none of these strategies dominate the other,

so really all you can do is play each strategy with an equal probability: 1/3, 1/3, 1/3, okay