Rock-Paper-Scissors

Most of us have fond memories of playing rock-paper-scissors as children. It never occured to me that a World Championship would be held one day (with a prize of $50,000 too!!)

After reading Fortune's Formula (supposedly for its coverage of Shannon, but in reality because it was the most convenient thing lying around on a lazy Saturday evening when my computer broke down yet again), I am in this frame of mind thinking about every action as a probability, adding more and more things to the list of 'random events' and trying to predict or analyse them.

And this morning, guess what was waiting for me in my google reader? A freakonomics post over the weekend, with a link to the authors' posts on the 2006 edition, and viewer's suggestions for rock paper scissors strategies... yes... real strategies meant in the serious sense... like "Open with scissors". People outguessing each other... statistically (scissors is used least...29.6%, so use paper a lot!), psychologically (beginners begin with rock, as they believe it to be solid, so use paper against them), reverse psychology (experienced players expect a rock against them, so start with scissors) and just plain cheating (extending a match into a 'best of 3 contest')

Makes me think how many books have been written in the outguessing game. Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene is one book I remember. There was a whole chapter about Strategies... Eagles and Doves, strategies in the Eagle-Dove game, comparison of pro-active, inactive, reactive and random strategies... if there were jobless people then, it must have been those scientists who programmed strategies for random events just to test them out. Ed Thorpe's books on Blackjack... which I haven't read, but are supposedly much more mathematical and less speculative... John Kelly's Information-Price relationship in a random game (derived from strategies to beat random noise in Claude Shannon's information model). A million books on how to "Beat the Market".... (Ok..just 4082 in Amazon)

I wonder if somehow somewhere deep inside everyone, there is a daemon that tells us that we can outwit everyone else... Is there a psychological term for this phenomenon? If not, I claim the right to name it Foxitis....