Rock, Paper, Scissors

Published by patrick honner on

NYT rock paper scissorsThis is a great interactive Rock-Paper-Scissors game from the New York Times website:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/rock-paper-scissors.html

The computer will narrate its strategy for you as you play, telling you whether it has correctly predicted your choice or not.

Skeptical?  Play the game against the Veteran computer and watch it beat you!  Then, go check out this infographic for some tips on how to improve your play.

It might be fun to pit a 6-sided die against the computer to see what happens.


patrick honner

Math teacher in Brooklyn, New York

3 Comments

Alan · March 8, 2011 at 7:10 pm

I tried Veteran mode on the first try. It was a tie of 2 wins to 2 wins and one draw. I won the tiebreaker. It seems that there is no piece of data that matches my strategy and I am “unpredictable.” I find it hard to believe that of the thousands of rounds it attempted, it couldn’t find that combination.

    Fung · October 6, 2014 at 11:50 pm

    After 20 rounds with a veteran computer, I got a score of 10 wins, 6 ties, 4 losses. I briefly read the article “How to win Rock-paper-scissors every time” on http://flowingdata.com/2010/07/30/how-to-win-rock-paper-scissors-every-time/. However I think the strategy stated in the article focused on human players not computers. My suggestion for playing with an AI would be to create a pattern and then defying it to trick the computer…

MrHonner · March 9, 2011 at 7:30 am

Five games is too small a sample to draw any conclusions. You have to give your opponent time to study you.

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