Playing the Rock-Paper-Scissors game with a genetic algorithm

Abstract

This paper describes a strategy to follow whilst playing the Rock-Paper-Scissors game. Instead of making a biased decision, a rule is adopted where the outcomes of the game from the last few turns are observed and then a deterministic decision is made. Such a strategy is encoded into a genetic string and a genetic algorithm works on a population of such strings. Good strings are produced in later generations. Such a strategy is found to be successful, and its efficiency is demonstrated by testing the strategy against both systematic and human strategies.