Rock Paper Scissors

Rock paper scissors is the universal tie-breaker, played everywhere from playgrounds to boardrooms. Its beauty is that no single move is best — each one beats one option and loses to another, forming a perfect three-way balance.

The rules

Rock crushes scissors, scissors cut paper, and paper covers rock. Both players reveal at once; matching moves are a tie. Here you pick a move and the computer reveals its choice instantly, with a running tally of your wins, losses, and ties.

Is there any strategy?

Against this game, no — the computer chooses uniformly at random, so over many rounds you'll trend toward one-third wins, one-third losses, one-third ties, no matter what you do. That randomness is what makes it perfectly fair.

Against **humans**, though, there is an edge, because people aren't random. Studies of real matches show patterns: players tend to **repeat a winning move**, **switch away after a loss**, and unconsciously **avoid throwing the same move three times** in a row. World championship players exploit exactly these tendencies. It's a small reminder of how hard it is for humans to be genuinely random.

Play a few rounds to warm up your decision-making — everything runs in your browser and your score stays on your device.