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Rock-Paper-Scissors

Posted by emmett on from the one-two-three-shoot dept.

Andreas Junghanns writes: "Check out the Second International RoShamBo Programming Competition for a completely different experience! If you think you know everything about Rock-Paper-Scissors -- here is your chance to prove it against some stiff international competition. At the Web site you can find rules, sample programs and a report of the first contest, complete with results and program descriptions." This looks pretty cool, and it might make a neat first project for someone, too.

2 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. I won the last year's competition -- here's how... by egnor · · Score: 5

    My submission, Iocaine Powder, won last year's competition. Follow the link to see a complete description of how it works. The competition results from last year describe some of the other strategies that did well (and some that did not-so-well).

    This competition is more complex than it seems; not only are there deliberate "dumb robots", but many of the real entries are quite predictable. A random player wouldn't have made it close to winning, and stalemates were rare.

    What does this year hold in store? We'll just have to see!

  2. Cheater bots by Temporal · · Score: 5

    Several cheater bots were entered in the last tournament. They were disqualified, of course, but here are the funniest ones:

    • Fork Bot: Every move, this bot would fork itself into 3 processes and make a different move in each one. Any process that lost would be killed off in the next round, with the winning process continuing the tournament. Thus, you would think that it would never lose. However, when playing against the Psychic Friends Network, all three moves resulted in a loss, causing the Fork Bot to kill itself off, ending in a forfeit.
    • The Psychic Friends Network: This program won 998/1000 rounds against any opponent other than The Matrix. No one really knows how it works, being incredibly obfusicated, but it appears to mess with the stack directly, among other things.
    • The Matrix: Based on the simple premise "There is no spoon", this program won every single round of every match it was in. (Being written by the author of the tournament software, this was not very hard)

    For more info, see this page (near the bottom).

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