My Rock Paper Scissors Program

Click Here to download a copy of my text-based rock paper scissors program. You will get a lot of warning messages about saving an exe file and stuff; just ignore them. It's not like I'm going to save my executable as an mp3 file.

How it works:

We've probably all been taught that rock paper scissors is a stupid game in which either player has equal chance of winning. Which is true, if both players throw randomly.
However, humans find it difficult to throw truly randomly and my program aims to exploit that. My program keeps a record of the user's past few throws and adjusts its throw percentages depending on whether it detects a pattern in the user's throw. For example, if the user throws rock, scissors, rock, scissors, the program will adjust its strategy to target that by tending to play paper, rock, paper, rock. If the program doesn't detect a pattern in the user's throws then it will just throw randomly.

At the moment the machine has only been programmed to target 1.Playing the same thing repeatedly 2.Playing two things alternatingly 3. Playing all three alternatingly.
If you have any other suggestions for common user plays that the program should target, please email me at jasonltang@gmail.com.

The ideal goal of this program would be to come out even while the user plays randomly and to take advantage of any pattern it spots when the user starts playing a pattern. Even the strongest RPS player might get exhausted from having to generate truly random plays, after which he will resort to a pattern and the computer will gain an edge.

A screenshot of my program