A rock paper scissors lizard spock tournament

In class today we bore witness to Tim’s talent at Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock and also: not everyone got chocolate.

A recording of the class is available here.

Using Nashpy to check if strategies are best responses to each other

I started the class by showing how to use nashpy to check if strategies are best responses to each other.

You can see the Nashpy documentation for this here: https://nashpy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/how-to/check-best-responses.html

You can find a link to a video demonstrating this here: https://vknight.org/gt/topics/best-responses.html

You can find the notebook I used in class here

A rock paper scissors lizard tournament

After this we moved on to class rock paper scissors tournament.

The first time I heard of this game (a variation of rock paper scissors) was in an episode of the Big Bang Theory. You can find a clip of it here: YouTube and a summary of the rules are available here.

After everyone played their tournaments (a knock out with a final) following that there was a “last player standing” session which lead to the grand final. Tim was victorious here (hail Tim) and we then started having a conversation about what made someone be good at Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock.

Interestingly all the ideas revolved around playing a best response to what you thought your opponent would do.

One thing I spoke about at the end was how to make that hard to do: being unpredictable.

Indeed, in this setting the only pair of strategies that are best responses to each other are:

\[\sigma_r=(1/5, 1/5, 1/5, 1/5, 1/5)\]

and

\[\sigma_c=(1/5, 1/5, 1/5, 1/5, 1/5)\]