--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, "Chris White" <cwhite2_at_s...> wrote: > For those that don't feel like reading the whole message, here's the > executive summary: brief comments rehashing what a lot of people have > already said, but with a Div II perspective; then a long winded > discussion on how, despite the claims of the nation's best players, > R-P-S is in fact an excellent subject for a quizbowl question. > > Part II, as promised. While generally not a fan of too much GK/trash (though a small amount is useful to provide to provide some spice and levity), I take issue with those who find rock-paper-scissors to be somehow a suubject of little substance. R-P-S is, in fact, an excellent example of many useful subjects in action: A: SOCIOLOGY/LINGUISTICS RPS is known by many different names, including (in English) all the permutations of its three components, as well as those added if you replace "rock" with "stone". Played around the world, with such names as "JanKen" and the ever-popular "Roshambo" (sometimes used in America!), the etymology of its various titles can be studied. In addition, the various things used to replace R, P, and S in different cultures are fascinating windows into diferent cultures. For instance, IIRC, in India, elephant beats man, man neats ant, and ant beats elephant. B: PSYCHOLOGY/GAMESMANHIP (maybe this isn't the best heading, but oh well) Rock-Paper-Scissors, is at its heart, a game of guessing and second-guessing, and being able to think past your opponents, or try to detect subconcious patterns, is crucial: only unsophisticated players think it's random. (Think of the scene from Watership Down where the Satan rabbit can beat everyone in odds or evens by psyching them out.) These factors are in fact, crucial elements of many games, especially poker, and the beauth of RPS is that it strips the rest away. Also, trying to judge one's personality by whether they throw rock, paper, or scissors is probably just as useful as a Rorsharch (sp?) test, so there you go. C: COMPUTER SCIENCE If you didn't know, there were two programming competitions held a while back in which people tried to build bots to play R-P-S. It actually turned out that the "random" bot didn't do too well, as the idea was to conduct abstract pattern recognition and anticipation, as well as exploiting rival bots' weaknesses, something my CS-major teammate tells me is actually a very hard thing to do. This competition, in fact, brought together many of the world's top CS and artificial intelligence minds... D. TRASH And, finally, there's plenty in the world of trash itself to welcome rock-paper-scissors. There's a World RPS society that actually holds cometitions with prizes up to $2000 or so, there's an intricately balanced five-item variant that includes Spock and Lizard, there's its widespread use for breaking ties in Ultimate Frisbee, there's the controversy over a fourth item, dynamite (which is a bad idea, considering that it breaks symmetry, the list goes on and on. I hope I've convinced you all of the worthiness of the subject, even if the writing is a little choppy for this time of night... -Chris
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