English

Semi-restricted Rock, Paper, Scissors

Combinatorics 2024-02-27 v1 Probability

Abstract

Consider the following variant of Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS) played by two players Rei and Norman. The game consists of 3n3n rounds of RPS, with the twist being that Rei (the restricted player) must use each of Rock, Paper, and Scissors exactly nn times during the 3n3n rounds, while Norman is allowed to play normally without any restrictions. Answering a question of Spiro, we show that a certain greedy strategy is the unique optimal strategy for Rei in this game, and that Norman's expected score is Θ(n)\Theta(\sqrt{n}). Moreover, we study semi-restricted versions of general zero sum games and prove a number of results concerning their optimal strategies and expected scores, which in particular implies our results for semi-restricted RPS.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2207.11272,
  title  = {Semi-restricted Rock, Paper, Scissors},
  author = {Sam Spiro and Erlang Surya and Ji Zeng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.11272},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

21 pages, 5 page appendix

R2 v1 2026-06-25T01:09:27.553Z