From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Wed Jan 09 2002 - 12:18:44 MST
> In fact, overly complicated games are likely not abstract enough to
> teach us much - the important things get lost in the specialized
> clutter and we tend to learn specialized skills rather than the
> general insights that are really useful.
It's no secret that I'm a big fan of games myself, and one of
the most amazing things I ever witnessed was a tournament among
eight professional high-stakes poker players, including former
world champion Phil Hellmuth, playing $100-entry winner-take-all
single-elimination...Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Although the game seems "trivial" (and is, is a purely game-
theoretical sense), play between humans definitely is not.
Rock, Paper, Scissors is, in a sense, the psychological aspects
of poker distilled to remove the mathematical and chance aspects.
The amazing thing to watch was Perry Friedman, author of the
original Roshambot <http://chappie.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/roshambot>
who has studied the game and played extensively, ran over the
field. They played each match as first-to-ten, and he won with
scores like 10-3, 10-4, 10-6 (the final against one of his close
friends, Lenny Augustine; the 10-4 was against Hellmuth).
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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