Apparently an art collector in Tokyo couldn’t decide between selling a collection via Christie’s or Sotheby’s, so he asked them to play Scissors, Paper, Stone [rock, paper, scissors] for the right to sell the collection.
Sotheby’s reluctantly accepted this as a 50/50 game of chance, but Christie’s asked the experts, Flora and Alice, 11-year-old daughters of the company’s director of Impressionist and modern art, and aficionados of the game.
They explained their strategy:
1. Stone is the one that “feels” the strongest
2. Therefore a novice will expect their opponent to go for stone, and will go for paper to beat stone
3. Therefore go for scissors firstSure enough, the novices at Sotheby’s went for paper, and Christie’s scissors got them an enormously lucrative cut.
Without any data to back it up, I also think that stone is played more often because it feels “strong”, but apart from that I think the only consistent thing about rps/sps is that we all believe for a second that we can peer into the mind of our opponent. Don’t we?
To Jesper all you need to know :
http://www.worldrps.com/
and so much more
First time I played SPS with my wife she chose “fire”, a rather illustrative finger simulations of flames. I’m still not sure what to make of that…
Students at Bethel University have created a pattern matching Java applet, that uses correlated statistics from thousands of online RPS players to beat the Rock out of you:
http://cas.bethel.edu/dept/math-cs/RPS.html
Good ole rock, nothing beats rock!
Without checking the links above: I think that stone is played the least because it is the one where you do nothing (I and everybody I have played against have a closed fist when we count down before showing our hand). I base this on the idea that people like to do something, whatever, when they play. The idea of counting down and then not move a finger when the fight begins is alien and takes discipline. So, a novice would not choose stone.
Interesting point.
I think we need hard data to determine this, but I think it’s considered too unimportant for anybody to do the research!
I much prefer “cockroach, foot, nuclear bomb”.
foot crushes cockroach, nuclear bomb kills foot, cockroach survives nuclear bomb.
Nice! A precise update of an arcane game. Will teach my kids immediatly.