Thanks for the story link.

–matt

Right?

Related story: A Florida federal judge this week ordered two bickering attorneys to play RPS to settle their argument, but unfortunately, it was only one round. And only one attorney (so far) is planning to comply with the order to play.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/07/magazines/fortune/rps_fortune/

In order to have a higher probability of winning, a player must be able to predict (at least some of the time) which of the opponent’s actions is the most probable. In this sense, non-perfectly-random players could be said to “leak information” to the opponent about their future moves; the opponent is trying to “get inside their head” and model their decision making, to predict their most probable choice. (The similarity with predictive models for information compression is striking).

Actually, it might be worth looking at ways we can make our PvP systems more Rock-Paper-Scissors-like.

I would think that you are correct, because we should view the competition not in terms of randomness of the players, but in randomness of the match. In other words, as long as one of the players in a given match is throwing pure random, then the match itself is randomized. It is only when neither player is throwing random that the match is non-random and the chance arises to do consistently better than 50-50.

Note the implication that pure randomness can only be the sole optimal strategy against a non-random opponent. Against a random opponent, the match is randomized no matter what you do, so any strategy is equally optimal. Against a non-random opponent, there is either an optimal non-random strategy - which occurs when the player is better than the opponent, or the optimal strategy is pure randomness, when the player is worse than the opponent, and any hint of non-randomness could be exploited.

Also, I like the blog.

www.ringsofhonor.org

This gaming/roleplaying environment has created three “sports” that are, more or less, matrix-base dueling. RPS is also matrix-based dueling. The difference in these matrices is the purposeful design of each choice/move not being equally useful to others, as well as some more advanced rules.

They’ve created a Duel of Swords(larger playerbase over the past 18 years than any MUD besides Simutronics’ headliners), and nearly as popular variants Duel of Magic and Duel of Fists. All three of these sports utilize, at minimum(DoS being the smallest matrix), 15 different moves, and at Maximum, 28. Like RPS, the scoring is broken down to rounds, with more specific scoring rules for each game. The games then also have very complex ranking, challenge, and political systems infused in the background.

These “sports” are perfectly suited to the roleplaying environment, and each is very unique from the other two. My point is that they have taken the concept of matrix dueling and created something that requires both more use of strategy, and a heavy reliance on psychology. Just as with professional RPS players, the top DoS/F/M players in the world are a master of their opponents psychology and understand all of the different gambits and patterns of that matrix.

I’ve used this system to create an identical mini-game on a MUD(with their permission). Clandestine MUD utilizes Duel of Swords as a mini-game, and while the PvP itself is not focused on this matrix/RPS style of combat, it has made for an extremely popular mini-game that allows the results of each round to be customizably roleplayed out by the duelists. While the results of a Thrust versus Stophit round will always yield the same result, this has allowed many of our roleplayers who do not like the crunch/hack’nslash elements of our PvP system to still be competitive in a variant on PvP that allows them to roleplay each round out entirely to their own personal liking.

So, as a longtime member of the Rings of Honor community, a top-ranking duelist in all three Games, and a game designer who has implemented this successfully, I would say there is definitely merit in a matrix combat-system.

Also, many have attempted to create complex bots that use A.I. to study opponents, learn from them, randomize at the right times and “scout”(use the opponent’s studied patterns against them) at the right time. Even with some amazing coders in the community, the best bots have not been able to defeat the best players. Bots that are completely dice-roll/randomized-based tend to do very poorly. The key seems to be in weighing the matrix so that it is not as flush as RPS.