Robots and their pesky artificial intelligence will eventually take over the world, but in the mean time get your kicks schooling some chimps in Rock, Paper, Scissors.

A new study at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute in Japan shows that chimpanzees have learnt to play the game to the level of a four-year-old human child.

I don’t know how that’s going to affect your chances of beating one, but here’s a video to check out;

Via Live Science:

The apes took an average of about 1.71 sessions to learn the paper-rock sequence, and about 3.14 sessions to learn the rock-scissors pair, but the final scissors-pair combination took about 14.29 sessions to learn. This suggests the chimps had difficulty understanding the circular nature of the game, the researchers said.

Once the chimpanzees learned how all the pairs worked, the scientists displayed a random mix of all three pairs for the apes. After an average of 307 sessions playing the game, with three 12- to 15-minute sessions a day, five of the seven chimps showed they had mastered the game, picking the winning choice at least 90 percent of the time…

“We’ve proved that chimpanzees have the intellectual capability to learn circular relationships, and of course humans have this capability. So the logical conclusion is that the last common ancestor that humans and chimpanzees had about 6 million years ago may also have had this kind of capability,” [study senior author Tetsuro] Matsuzawa said.

It’s the next step in the study that most excites me, with researchers keen to test how well their chimps in Japan perform at the game against humans, or against chimps in the United States.

The world of competitive sport is sorely lacking a chimpanzee Rock, Paper, Scissors showdown between the best primates from Japan and the USA, but the wait may finally be over.

[source:livescience]