It is a lingua franca, or a universal game, dating back to the Han dynasty of China (206 BC-220 AD), simply called shoushilling (trans. ‘hand command’) and nearly two thousand years later we still play this simple game, called by various names all over the globe. English speakers call it Roshambo (technically Rochambeau) or “rock-paper-scissors”, “ick-ack-ock”, or even “ching-chang-walla” and is most often played between 2 people in a decision-making challenge, much like drawing straws or plucking daisy petals, but requires no props real props. While it was introduced to Europeans as late as the 1920’s for its portability and simple instructions, quickly gained popularity for its considered “uncheatable” fairness.
In the 1930’s Rochambeau was promoted widely in America, more specifically aimed towards school-age children that could take this game with them where-ever they may be and use it to settle trivial disputes (thereby freeing up the parents/adults need to intercept in trivial matters and be the bad guy or ‘fair picker’).
Much of the persistence of this simple game is its’ cross-cultural utility. Scientifically it is assumed to be the ultimate representation of randomized ‘fairness’, if only it were truly random. Scientists like to prove theories wrong more than right and now that we have supercomputers to do calculations that, what once may have seemed futile, is now reasonable for robots to ply away those pernickety problems.
Since there are serious international tournaments for Rochambeau, strategies have been devised and algorithms studied in order to gain a sharper edge. In June of 2012 Tokyo revealed they had invented a robotic hand that wins roshambo every single time, 100% accuracy rate. We humans may think we are capable of being random, but a robot seems to understand our flash decision making better than we do. In fact, I’m sure you know someone who claims to be spontaneous (adventurous) yet does the same predictable things over and over again.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records the largest Rock, Paper Scissors Tournament was held in Indianapolis, Indiana on August 17th, 2014 with 2,950 “people”, it is not clear whether this was the total attendance or number of competitors (since it is an even number).
Using a compilation of strategies and meta-strategies over the course of a decade, researchers have come up with the most effective algorithm which blends aspects of history matching based on what is called ‘Markov chains’ which uses memorylessness to determine statistical probabilities of real world “random” scenarios.
More than just a game Rochambeau was used in 2006 by a federal judge in deciding where to hold the deposition for an American court case. A year before that the Japanese business mogul and art aficionado Takashi Hashiyama auctioned his precious impressionistic art collection (with works by Picasso, van Gogh and Cezanne) which led to a fierce competition between Sotheby’s and Christies Auction houses, so he had them ‘sansukumi-ken’ (the earliest known name for Japanese version) for the opportunity to make their percentage(s). Christie’s won. The collection sold for $20 million. A nice commission.
Transcending distance, time, and application even lizard mating strategies and some bacteria have been closely studied for their likeness in exhibiting the rock-paper-scissors effect. Most applicable as it applies to the current generation (of coders, gamers, big data miners, etc.) Rochambeau is considered one of the (most) “basic applications of game theory and non-linear dynamics to bacteriology.”
Giving rise to the games cultural charm, the popular character Sheldon from the sitcom Big Bang Theory expanded the three elements to include two additional choices; Spock and lizard. In this version Spock can vaporize (of course) the rock and can smash scissors (not sure how that works), but he (Spock) can be poisoned by the lizard and worse, disproven by the paper.
“Engineering serendipity is this idea that we can help people come across unexpected but helpful connections at a better random rate. And in some ways it’s based on trying to reassess this notion of serendipitous as lucky-to think of serendipitous as smart.” –Ethan Zuckerman
Comments
Post a Comment