Rock-paper-scissors
It is no coincidence that several problems in simulation competitions refer to playing games: at varying levels of complexity, games offer an environment with clearly defined rules, naturally lending itself to the agent-action-reward framework. Aside from Tic-Tac-Toe, connecting checkers is one of the simplest examples of a competitive game. Moving up the difficulty ladder (of games), let’s have a look at rock-paper-scissors and how a Kaggle contest centered around this game could be approached.
The idea of the Rock, Paper, Scissors competition (https://www.kaggle.com/c/rock-paper-scissors/code) was an extension of the basic rock-paper-scissors game (known as roshambo in some parts of the world): instead of the usual “best of 3” score, we use “best of 1,000.”
We will describe two possible approaches to the problem: one rooted in the game-theoretic approach, and the other more focused on the algorithmic side.
We begin...
