From Rock, Paper, Scissors to Street Fighter II: Proof By Construction

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From Rock, Paper, Scissors to Street Fighter II: Proof By Construction
Yotam I. Gingold
In Proceedings of Sandbox 2006, Boston, MA, July 2006.
Best Paper Award
paper (3.5M) | movie (25M) | presentation PowerPoint (7.1M) PDF (w/o notes) (12M) PDF (with notes) (11M)

BibTeX can be found on the ACM page.

Abstract

Competitive fighting games, where players choose a rapid sequence of actions designed to trump an opponent's simultaneous actions, are more complex, real-time adaptations of the well-known game Rock, Paper, Scissors. We present an analysis of Rock, Paper, Scissors's gameplay, as well as real-time variations. These variations comprise a constructive argument that competitive fighting games, such as Capcom's Street Fighter II, are indeed also variants of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Notes:

If you're only interested in the analysis of RPS and SF2, skip sections on variants 1-4.
In hindsight, I should have made a stronger statement about the graph of player choices: that it should contain no sinks whatsoever (sources are OK). This is the statement I make in my presentation.