I've been doing a lot of writing, not only for this opinion blog, but also a creative writing blog and as a contributing writer for This or That. Well the other day, one of the writers for This or That posted an article about lessons he learned playing rock-paper-scissors with his computer. (Follow this link to try it out for yourself)
I tried it and I have to warn you that the computer cheats, a lot. OK, it doesn't actually cheat, but it uses it's superior computing powers to review all of your past moves and uses your paterns against you. It's so not fair, but you can click on a button to see into the computers brain and watch it review your move history. Let's say your last four moves were rock, paper, paper, scissors. The computer reviews all your moves to see if you've ever followed that pattern before. If so, it looks to see what you threw after that pattern and moves accordingly. If not, it will look for the pattern of paper, paper, scissors. This computer model isn't far off from what we go through when we decide which of the three to throw when we play, but we don't have such an extensive and exact memory.
So how did I do? After two hundred rounds I basically broke even. I managed to win, lose and draw about a third of the time for each. It wasn't easy to reach this mark either. I had to continually change my thinking. If I didn't change my strategy, and conciously think about my strategy, I didn't stand a chance. It was by having a pattern, but keeping it random that I was able to keep the computer from beating me. If you've got some time, it's a good exercise to try and outsmart the computer.
See if you can do better than I did, and leave a comment below to let me know how you did.
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