I'm awake waiting for Taco Bell. While waiting, my roommate and I decided to indulge ourselves with stumbleupon. As we stumbled, I can across a RPS Machine produced by The New York Times. This machine is rather uncanny in its ability to predict what choices you make in selecting your throw. Michael boasted that he could beat it. Well, he didn't do much better than me. But that prompted an immediate RPS duel.
And because we're comp sci majors, we obviously geeked it up. We kept track of each throw that we made, and would stop after a set number of throws to explain our logic. My throws were...terrible. BUT! There was a method.
We played three games. The first consisted of six rounds, the second seven rounds, and the third eight rounds. In total, Michael had fourteen wins and I had two. There were five ties.
Michael threw eight scissors, I threw four. Michael threw eight papers, I threw thirteen. Michael threw five rocks, I through four. I also threw the bird a few times because I'm a sore loser.
In total: scissors was thrown twelve times, paper was thrown 21 times, and rock was thrown nine times. With a little bit of math, 28% of throws were scissors, 5% were paper, and 19% were rock. Of the WINNING throws, 33% were scissors, 29% were paper, and 14% were rock.
While we haven't exactly cracked the code yet, and we've made it to Taco Bell and back now and the discussion is now more focused on how amazing the double layer tacos are, so we probably won't. But it's still nice to know that we *might* one day.
And, as a treat for actually reading all the way through a post, here's a link to a helpful little guide to winning RPS. Now to memorize this while Michael is busy stuffing his face.
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