[HN Gopher] Rock, paper, scissors showdown
___________________________________________________________________
Rock, paper, scissors showdown
Author : fidotron
Score : 83 points
Date : 2025-05-23 11:05 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (luduxia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (luduxia.com)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| See also Shannon (1953):
| https://this1that1whatever.com/miscellany/mind-reader/Shanno...
| rkagerer wrote:
| Well there's a few minutes of my life I won't get back.
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| Are there some you do?
| sethammons wrote:
| One could argue that if the memory is accessed ever again,
| you are reusing that minute. If the memory will never
| marginally add to your lived experience, it could be viewed
| as unredeemable and time you don't get to leverage in the
| future, and thus is time wasted/time lost.
| xnickb wrote:
| > If the memory will never marginally add to your lived
| experience, it could be viewed as unredeemable
|
| There is also the aspect of reinforcing existing memories
| which is easy to miss with this criteria. In the sense that
| any single given experience won't significantly alter your
| life, but if you remove all of them, suddenly a change
| happens.
|
| I for once had my gears grinding trying to recall my
| patterns and predict moves of the "AI". Especially past
| round 20.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| I lasted 26 rounds with a max of 11 coins. I'm gonna pretend
| that's good and not average so I can feel like I didn't just get
| owned.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| 32 and 10. I normally lose much faster when I play friends.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I went 37 rounds with a max of 14.
| ljf wrote:
| Wish I'd screenshot it but I quit at 32 points after a series
| of combos - think I had no more than 15 rounds.
| duc_minh wrote:
| 114 rounds and counting with a max of 87 coins, a combo of 7.
| Guess I have some anti-Markov behaviours -\\_(tsu)_/-
| sugarkjube wrote:
| Yeah, if you know it's markov, you can exploit that.
| ponco wrote:
| I had an old colleague who had a favourite lunch room trick - if
| challenged to Scissors, Paper, Rock then he would win every
| single time. I presumed it was some kind of behavioural
| psychology trick, but it didn't occur to me it's just a pattern
| recognition. Or maybe it was both. I should get in touch again...
| okwhateverdude wrote:
| That split second before a throw resolves is a slice of time
| where you can observe what your opponent is throwing, and
| change yours at the very last moment.
| ljf wrote:
| I remember telling a friend I'd always beat him at the game,
| and I always did. I had no more skill than telling him I'd win
| each time and I pretty much always did especially if it was
| best of three
| yard2010 wrote:
| A fun trick my co-worker had taught me: when someone pops in
| your head like this, send him a message
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Apart from the Markov stuff, there's something hilariously
| surreal about the graphics and music of this. COMBO BREAKER!
| sweeter wrote:
| I got a combo of 6 up to 45. Pretty fun. I tried to condition it
| into what I would normally do, and then tried to subvert that
| sugarkjube wrote:
| Got bored after 24 rounds. was up 20, 12 wins, 6 losses. If you
| know it's learning using markov, you can exploit that. (Just
| tried to imagine what the computer would do based on my/his
| history, and tried to switch my strategie during the game - but i
| think i could not stick that way of playing for a long time)
| avodonosov wrote:
| My "all time" stats: Played 145 times
| Max credits 49 Max combo 8 Win 56 (39%)
| Draw 35 (24%) Loss 54 (37%)
|
| My "this game" stats: Played 94 times
| Current credits 45 Max credits 49 Max combo 8
| Win 39 (41%) Draw 25 (27%) Loss 30 (32%)
|
| I was playing mostly as with a living oponent.
|
| When playing I was not exploiting any assumptions about it being
| Markov learner (I don't even understand how it learns and how to
| exploit it)
|
| While it can not learn to beat me most of the time, it is
| playable.
|
| How do you know it learns with markov chain? How exactly? (What
| states the chain has? Other details?)
|
| Why does camera shakes at every move? To me that's very annoying.
|
| The game needs stats of the total credits I spent including
| previous rounds, so that I see the total spent/won balance. I am
| clearly winning on that measure.
| fidotron wrote:
| Firstly, thanks for playing!
|
| > How do you know it learns with markov chain? How exactly?
| (What states the chain has? Other details?)
|
| I wrote it! It uses five chains of different lengths, and each
| of those estimates the next, then a standard way of resolving
| those to a single signal.
|
| > Why does camera shakes at every move? To me that's very
| annoying.
|
| Yeah, it is. The first version you actually spun around on the
| spot too, which was cool but made you sick, even on a phone.
| Therefore I hacked it to this, but it's not great.
|
| > The game needs stats of the total credits I spent including
| previous rounds, so that I see the total spent/won balance. I
| am clearly winning on that measure.
|
| In the menu there is "statistics" which contains more stats
| than live stats, and that might have more of what you want!
| croemer wrote:
| Is there any evidence that it actually uses Markov chains? I
| don't see any mention. The title here might as well be made up to
| troll HN?
| jll29 wrote:
| I was also wondering that - is the poster the author?
|
| In any case Markov chains are a simple and elegant mechanism
| for making predictions, easy enough to understand so that even
| school kids at grade eleven (which is where probability theory
| got introduced when I underwent it) can follow the popular
| "weather forecasting" tutorial using MCs.
|
| Onwards, Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) add to MCs a layer of
| hidden states and associated emission probabilities. To learn
| these, check out Lawrence Rabiner's beautiful tutorial:
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/18626
|
| Apart from their simplicity and mathematical elegance it is
| remarkable how little data and electricity these models require
| to do a good job.
| rfl890 wrote:
| Check OP's about. They are the author.
| sparky_ wrote:
| Good question. I'm at a 75% win/loss ratio by picking rock
| every single time. Doesn't appear to be learning in this
| session, anyway.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Good old rock, nothing beats that!
| fidotron wrote:
| I did write it, it does use Markov chains, and the whole thing
| should be self evidently a troll.
|
| For example, it is not necessarily trying to beat you. This was
| inspired by an experience with
| https://luduxia.com/whichwayround/ where I found most traffic
| came from people trying to break it, until one day it hit a
| mailing list and exploded.
| mettamage wrote:
| Why not make it a show HN?
| fidotron wrote:
| I have done other related ones before, and honestly find
| "Show HN" (understandably) involves a level of expected
| seriousness that other posts might not. Consequently I
| prefer to leave that only for things which are more serious
| in intent.
|
| This one I updated the game a bit, submitted a link, and it
| went nowhere when I posted it some days ago. I woke to a
| Linode alert of sustained outgoing traffic and it turns out
| the post had been resurrected.
| bArray wrote:
| My score:
|
| 38 wins (44%), 21 draws (24%), 28 losses (32%)
|
| Max combo 7
|
| I think I could have kept going too.
| srean wrote:
| I once ended up participating in rock, paper scissors strategy
| competition on a whim.
|
| At that time I was quite tired of polishing and repolishing a
| paper draft at my university. (I write very poorly). And there it
| was, an announcement of this fun competition. The deadline was
| just an hour away.
|
| I had no time to implement any respectable algorithm myself.
|
| So, all my submission did was take the history of plays of my
| opponent, up to the present point in the ongoing joust, and
| extend it by three possible completions. I would compress each of
| the three resulting strings. Whichever completion gave the
| shortest compressed final string, I assumed that to be my
| opponent's predicted play. I played whatever beat that predicted
| play.
|
| This did not win the competition, but survived the knockout for
| many rounds, beyond my expectation. If I remember correctly, I
| had used plain old zip. A compressor that converges faster would
| have been better.
|
| In essence my strategy was similar to a Markov chain predictor.
| It would have been exact match had I used a Markov model based
| compressor.
|
| The number of rounds of play against one's opponent was not long.
| Had it been so, Lempel-Ziv being an universal compressor, would
| have been hard to beat.
|
| Of course we know from game theoretic analysis what the Nash
| strategy is for this game, but where is the fun in playing that ?
|
| One might think that a transformer based player would be an
| excellent strategy, not necessarily. One needs to _learn_
| potentially non-stationary strategies of the opponent from very
| few examples - (near) zero-shot online learning is required.
|
| If I had more time, I would have tried context-weighted trees -
| universal learners for stochastic strings. The failure mode would
| be non-ergodic plays by the opponent, assuming that, it too is
| another stochastic parrot.
| fidotron wrote:
| The canonical rps program contest is http://www.rpscontest.com/
| and many of the entries get surprisingly good.
|
| Of course these things will always have to assume a semi
| strategic opponent.
| srean wrote:
| Thanks !
|
| Following your link I found this
|
| https://daniel.lawrence.lu/programming/rps/
|
| Submitted.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44105859
|
| There goes my afternoon, nicely nerd sniped :) Thank you.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| > I write very poorly
|
| Probably not. Most writing is self-congratulatory garbage. The
| best writing I've ever read was not meant to be fancy but got
| right to the point from the heart, by people who couldn't care
| less what others thought about them. Your writing in this
| comment was fine and easy to read.
| srean wrote:
| Thanks for the kind validation.
|
| I am still very bad as far as writing research papers go.
| That's one area my advisor's feedback helped a lot. Anything
| I wrote would need multiple passes.
|
| My writing's bad, partly because of bad grammar and partly
| because once the cool results of the research is done, my
| heart is really not into writing it. It becomes a chore.
|
| EDIT: I see no reason why your comment got down-voted.
| 90s_dev wrote:
| Ignore the downvotes. They don't really mean anything on
| HN, and points fluctuate wildly over the course of 24-48
| hours in both directions. I have a theory that HN literally
| adds random up/down votes to comments periodically just to
| mess with us.
| fidotron wrote:
| Thanks for playing everyone.
|
| As mentioned, I was slightly surprised to see this trending this
| morning given I thought it had gone nowhere in a prior
| submission.
|
| Some tech details no one asked about:
|
| * Custom WebGL2 renderer
|
| * Leaderboards are in FoundationDB (talk about overkill)
|
| The markov chains are a fairly standard 5 chain ensemble setup.
| Each chain is configured to process k-(1..5) of your previous
| moves (for some value of k), and base the estimate of the next
| move on that. The ensemble mechanism takes care of working out
| which to go with. This is obviously harder than if it cheated,
| but it's more fun. The actual markov chain component took about
| an hour to write, the stats was worse.
|
| If you're interested in writing RPS players there have been many
| efforts http://www.rpscontest.com/ including things as linked
| elsehwere here like https://daniel.lawrence.lu/programming/rps/ .
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-05-27 23:02 UTC)