Scientists reveal secrets behind winning 'rock-paper-scissors' game

A new scientific way has been found to win the schoolyard game of 'rock-paper-scissors'.

The study by scientists at Zhejiang University in China has revealed that players tend to repeat the pattern of moves that makes them win the game, meaning if they won with by offering up a 'rock', they're more likely to play rock again, the Huffington Post reported.

Dr. Zhijian Wang from the university wrote in the paper that this new strategy may offer higher payoffs to individual players and they hope this work will stimulate further experimental and theoretical studies on the microscopic mechanisms of decision-making and learning in basic game systems.

It was also said that this strategy seems to defy the Nash equilibrium theory, named after the American mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., who was also the subject of the film 'A Beautiful Mind'.

The paper was published in the preprint journal arXiv.org.