A rock paper scissors lizard spock tournament

In class today we played a Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock tournament.

A recording of the class is available here.

A summary of the rules of Rock Paper Scissors 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. Osian was victorious here and indeed he also beat me. We had a conversation about what made a good strategy for this game.

We spoke a bit about the fact that Osian did not play Lizard or Spock so we approximated his strategy as:

\[\sigma_r=(1/3, 1/3, 1/3, 0, 0)\]

I then spoke a bit about how we could find a Nash equilibrium (a pair of best responses) using the support enumeration algorithm which is what we shall attack in the next class.