ABSTRACT
All interesting games involve randomness at some level. It can take on different forms. In a board game with dice or shuffled cards, the randomness is explicit in the rules. For a computer, game attacks or opponent decisions can be explicitly made using random values that are not visible to the player. Even in a game with no explicit randomness, there must be implicit randomness for the game to be interesting. As described in Chapter 7, rock-paper-scissors is viable because the optimal strategy is a mixed one. The rules lead players to make random decisions because if they don’t, their opponents will be able to predict their actions. Rock-paper-scissors is even considered a serious strategy game among some players in a similar, but simpler, way that poker is played at a strategic level because an opponent’s failure to play in a purely statistical manner can be exploited over many iterations.
