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Recursive Adversarial Reasoning in the Rock, Paper, Scissors Game

Creative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
Abstract

In this study, we investigate people’s ability to predict andadapt to the behavior of others in order to make plans of theirown, a cornerstone of cooperative and competitive behavior.Participants played 300 rounds of rock, paper, scissors againstanother human player. We investigate the degree to which par-ticipants are able to identify patterns in their opponent’s be-havior in order to exploit them in subsequent rounds. We findstrong evidence that participants exploit their opponents overthe course of 300 rounds, suggesting that people identify de-pendencies in their opponent’s move choices during the game.Nonetheless, analysis of dependencies across participant movechoices reveals that people exhibit a number of regularities intheir own moves. Based on these dependencies, we argue thatparticipants are far from optimal in their exploiting, suggestingthat there are substantial constraints on people’s ability to iden-tify and adapt to patterned opponent behavior across repeatedinteractions.

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