Newsgroups: rec.sport.disc
Subject: Re: Ro-cham-beau
Date: 27 Sep 1994 00:11:29 GMT
Don't know where these claims of an asian origin for rock-paper-scissors (a.k.a. Rochambeau) came from. My grandfather (on my father's side) invented the game (along with some friends of his, all of them construction workers in Chicago) around 1925.
At the time, decisions were often made with an "odd/even" finger game. One person would take "odd", the other would take "even." At the count of three, each person would then hold out some number of fingers. If the sum was odd, the "odd" person would win, and if the sum was even... well, you get the idea. According to my grandfather (now deceased), you usually weren't supposed to hold out three, four or five fingers---only one or two were allowed. He thinks it's because it was too hard to immediately distinguish between, for example four and five fingers, so someone could cheat by sticking out an extra one quickly, after seeing the other person's hand. He said that rule wasn't completely standard, though.
This way of making decisions was apparently common, as rock-paper-scissors is now.
Anyway, one day my grandfather just stuck in his fist. "What the hell is that?", his friend asked. "It's ZERO, you idiot", replied my grandfather. This caught on with my grandfather's circle of friends, who liked the quirkiness of using zero.
Once the idea of experimenting with the game came up, they quickly came up with a variant: You could do either a fist or two fingers (for an even number), but ALL FIVE fingers (spread out) to make an odd number. This was their own little private variation, which they used for a while, and felt was fair. But other people (used to the traditional one- or two-finger game) didn't like it, feeling that the asymmetry (two ways to show an even number, one way to show odd) gave either the odd or the even person an advantage, although they never figure out who.
So the experimentation started again. (My g'father was unclear on the exact order. At some point it was decided that two "zeros" should require a re-do, because they add to zero, and it wasn't clear whether that should really count as an "even" number. My g'father wasn't sure whether this was before or after complaints about the asymmetry came up---it may have been an attempt to answer the problem). Anyway, at some point one of my g'father's friends (he knew the name, I forget) suggested a new variant, in which the sum was not important at all: whoever held up the lower "value" won, except that 5 would beat zero. [This seems like a very odd set of rules, but my grandfather saved a Scientific American article from around 1980 that discussed the invention of several number games, and one of them had a similar sort of rule, so for some reason it must have a natural appeal.] Obviously, a tie required a re-do.
Anyway, they still considered it a "number game" for awhile, but it didn't take long before they realized that they didn't need to bother adding stuff up every time: the fist beat a 2, a 2 beat an open hand, and an open hand beat a fist. My g'father says that a long time (years?) went by before anyone called this "rock-paper-scissors", and he doesn't know who called it that. He said he could never figure it out..."Paper covers rock? That means paper wins? Does that make any sense?" Of course, he admitted the original set of rules didn't make much sense either.
My grandfather died several years ago. At the time, I had never heard the game referred to as "Rochambeau", and I'm sure he never did either.
So, now you know the story.
By the way, I feel that I should mention that nothing in the above post is true. Oh, except my grandfather did die several years ago.
--Phil Price