Game Idea: RoShamBo

[dimkadimon]

A while ago there was a competition for Rock-Paper-Scissors game: http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsbpc.html

At first I thought that the best strategy should be just random. However, when there are deterministic bots with a definite patterns (eg., always play a winning strategy to the opponent's last move) then a clever bot should do better. So the task boils down to learning/predicting your opponent's strategy. There has been some serious research done in this area and so the problem is quite interesting and non-trivial. Also I like that the game is very easy to understand, easy to code and testing should be very fast (I am thinking in the order of 100 moves per second).

We could repeat this challenge with a small modification. One idea I had was to extend the game to multiple players. This can be done by doing score=(number of people you beat) - (number of people you lost to). The aim is to maximize the score. Here are some examples for 3 players:

* A chooses rock, B chooses paper and C chooses paper. scoreA=-2, scoreB=1, scoreC=1
* A chooses rock, B chooses rock and C chooses paper. scoreA=-1, scoreB=-1, scoreC=2
* A chooses rock, B chooses paper and C chooses scissors. scoreA=0, scoreB=0, scoreC=0
* A chooses rock, B chooses rock and C chooses rock. scoreA=0, scoreB=0, scoreC=0

This extra complexity should make the challenge sufficiently difficult and different from the previous one.

[dimkadimon]

So no one at all interested in this idea?!? Not even interested enough to say whether it is good or bad? Come on people.

I really like it. I am going to write some bots that play this n-player game and run some tournaments to see which strategy does best. I think the winning strategy here is very different to the winning strategy in the 2-player version.

[smiley1983]

I like the idea.

I'm not sure if it's interesting to watch the replays - less likely to attract attention as a contest.

The task of second-guessing a group of opponents all doing the same thing is certainly interesting.

If someone wants to write the game code, I would be happy to host it on the TCP server.