Talk:Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock/@comment-4793317-20121017195736/@comment-108.28.83.116-20160216225817

Duh -- that's why the joke is sooo funny! This story line is HILARIOUS for two reasons. The most obvious is the Who's on First patter to the explanation of the new rules. It's just funny to listen to Sheldon rattle off the rules. But there's a deeper humor at work here that reinforces the themes of the entire series -- smart guys struggling to live in a dumbed down world. They added Lizard Spock to reduce the risk of a tie. While traditional Rock Scissors Paper (RSP) presents a non-trivial risk of a tie with only two players (1 in 3), the risk of a universal tie quickly diminishes as you add players -- with just 3 players, the risk falls to only 1 in 9. Since they always play as a group, there is very little risk they'd all tie playing traditional RSP. Thus, their decision to add two more characters is a complex solution to a problem that doesn't even exist in the real world -- a quintessential theme that runs through so many episodes. The ADHD in them forces them to change the rules to drive a very small risk to near zero. Even if the risk of ties was non-trivial, their solution still doesn't solve the problem, because they forgot the one rule of probability that every third grader learns -- probability math only works if all variables are equally likely to occur. Their obsession with Star Trek ensures they all pick Spock every time, and none of them recognizes the pattern and adjusts to pick Lizard or Paper (which both beat Spock). Indeed, it appears they are pathologically incapable of selecting anything other than Spock, which ensures their kids game (which would have rarely ended in a tie under traditional rules) now ends in a tie every time.