Ok, this is freaky, and depressing. Less than a month after Watson destroyed humanity’s finest Jeopardy playing minds, the New York Times has published this Rock-Paper-Scissors program which can predict your next move by analysing games played against other humans. Play it on “veteran” mode and prepare to be assimilated.

As the article points out,” a truly random game of rock-paper-scissors would result in a statistical tie with each player winning, tying and losing one-third of the time. However, people are not truly random and thus can be studied and analyzed. While this computer won’t win all rounds, over time it can exploit a person’s tendencies and patterns to gain an advantage”.

The “veteran” mode uses data from over 200,000 previous games to predict your moves as you play, whilst “novice” mode sees the program learn from scratch and try to detect patterns in your play. Clearly, it’s still a fair way away from true artificial intelligence, yet sadly, it still appears to be smarter than me…