A new study revealed the secret to winning the popular game rock-paper-scissors.
People who win tend to repeat their successful moves, while those losing usually switch it up, BBC News reported.
To make their findings the researchers looked at 360 students in China and divided them into groups of six; Each person played 300 rounds of the game. The participants were paid according to how many rounds they won.
Nash equilibrium (named after John Forbes Nash Jr, who the movie "A Beautiful Mind" was made for) is when both players select their move with equal probability in every round.
The team observed that players in all of the groups chose each action about a third of the time; but were more likely to repeat the winning move. Losers tended to select moves "in order of the name of the game," going from rock to paper to scissors, the BBC reported. If a player selected rock and losing the participants were more likely to choose paper the next round.
The so-called "win-stay lose-shift" strategy could be a conditional response that is already wired into our brains.
"The game of rock-paper-scissors exhibits collective cyclic motions which cannot be understood by the Nash equilibrium concept. Whether conditional response is a basic decision-making mechanism of the human brain or just a consequence of more fundamental neural mechanisms is a challenging question for future studies," the researchers wrote, the BBC reported.
The findings could help researchers learn more about human behavior in fields such as financial trading. Next the researchers plan to look into why people make irrational choices when competing, the BBC reported
"Our theoretical calculations reveal that this new strategy may offer higher payoffs to individual players in comparison with the NE mixed strategy, suggesting that high social efficiency is achievable through optimized conditional response," the researchers wrote in their study abstract.
