Play 50 or more rounds of this game of Rock-Paper-Scissors against the AI, before reading the rest of this post. If you read ahead before playing, you're not going to fully understand what I'm talking about.

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/rock-paper-scissors.html

 

 

 

 

The first time I was exposed to this game of Rock-Paper-Scissors, was in coding boot camp, when the instructor was explaining machine learning and the power of AI. I can't remember if I played against the novice or veteran version of the AI back then but in either case, I started out doing well in the game before I just PROGRESSIVELY got my @ss whipped royally by the AI, the more I played. If you don't put much thought into making your random decisions (which aren't actually random at all,) and do what just seems natural, the AI is guaranteed to ultimately beat you, over time. I just played it a couple times today (a year later) and beat him pretty well but only because I understand more about how it works.

 

See, the more you play the game, the more the AI is able to study your own behavior patterns and use that information when executing an action, against you.

 

Fascinating stuff, isn't it?

 

I tried the Novice one. I got 21 wins, 13 ties, 16 losses. Was able to use the machine's learning process against it. Tried to appear like I was playing by a pattern, then switching it up based on how I predicted the computer would act. Seems like the machine is not going so meta in its analysis, but maybe over more rounds it gets there.