[curiouscat]

In case anyone shares an interest, there's this interesting (to me) contest online at http://www.rpscontest.com/

Essentially pitting your strategic wits against a few hundred others to try and win at Rock Paper Scissors. Algorithmically,  of course. Never realized there's so much to the game....

My code's still stuck at a measly 68% but the winning entries seem to win ~85% of the time. Impressive.

[fledarmus]

They should have a coin-flipping algorithm running at the same time - I bet they would get similar results. A qaussian distribution of strategies with the same predictive ability as no strategy at all. That's why casinos love gamblers with a system - it encourages them to keep betting even when they are losing.

[curiouscat]

They should have a coin-flipping algorithm running at the same time - I bet they would get similar results.

A coin flipper gets you `50% wins, sure.

e.g. http://www.rpscontest.com/entry/724002

But note that the winner gets ~85% wins, not a trivial lead. In an universe of coin-flippers there'd be no way of doing better but the reality is that people do try and win. And that means they try and use "strategies" less random than coin-flipping which implies one can try and beat them at it.

The other problem is that human opponents are notoriously bad coin flippers. No matter how hard a person tries to be random patterns creep in pretty quickly; so the algorithmic advantage lies  in trying to exploit these subliminal patterns. (Only against human opponents, of course)