Everyone knows how to play Rock, Paper, Scissors, which typically comes up as a quick means of settling some minor negotiation with the caveat that the winner is entirely arbitrary. The notion of a Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament is therefore a non sequitur, since the winner by no means possesses skill, or strategic combinations of throws devised to reliably defeat opponents. Rather, winners are the unfortunate recipients of a blind but lucky sequence, an algorithm, that produces an eventual winner yet is indifferent to the outcome. I can’t say quite why, exactly, but I’ve been puzzling over how three-way conflicts might be decided were the categories instead Strong, Stupid, and Smart, respectively.
Rock is Strong, obviously, because it’s blunt force, whereas Paper is Stupid because it’s blank, and Scissors is Smart because it’s the only one that has any design or sophistication. For reassignments to work, however, the circle…
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Creative Destruction 