Chimpanzees make monkeys of humans in computer game

The Los Angeles Times
Saturday, June 7, 2014 3:15 p.m. | Saturday, June 7, 2014 3:15 p.m.

In this photo taken Feb. 1, 2011, chimpanzees sit in an enclosure at the Chimp Eden rehabilitation center, near Nelspruit, South Africa. A paramedic official says chimpanzees at a sanctuary for the animals in eastern South Africa bit and dragged a man at the reserve, badly injuring him. In a statement, Jeffrey Wicks of the Netcare911 medical emergency services company said the man he described as a ranger was leading a tour group at the Jane Goodall Institute Chimpanzee Eden Thursday June 28, 2012 when two chimpanzees grabbed his feet and pulled him under a fence into their enclosure. The international institute founded by primatologist Jane Goodall opened the sanctuary in 2005. It is a home to chimpanzees rescued from further north in Africa, where they are hunted for their meat of held captive as pets. (AP Photo/Erin Conway-Smith)

When it comes to simple competitive games, chimps make a monkey out of humans and make a genius out of John Forbes Nash Jr.

Chimpanzees playing each other in a simple matching game outperformed human players, apparently by paying closer attention to opponents' patterns and adjusting more optimally, according to a study published last week in Scientific Reports.

As a result, the chimps more often reached an equilibrium point described by Nash, where neither could do much better by adjusting strategy (think of all those frustrating stalemates in tic-tac-toe, for example).

Researchers believe the different outcomes could be the byproduct of a cognitive trade-off in the course of evolution. Humans left the trees and developed language, semantic thought and cooperation, while our distant cousins kept right on doing what made them so successful in the first place — competing, deceiving and manipulating.

Lost? Let's just follow the chimps, then.

It's called the Inspection Game, and it's kind of an abstraction of a two-person game of hide-and-seek. Each player faces a computer screen the other can't see, and chooses between two blue squares, left or right. One player is rewarded for matching the other player (right-right or left-left), the other for mismatches.

Laboratory chimps in Kyoto, Japan, outperformed 16 Japanese university students, and did the same against 12 men playing the game with bottle caps in Bossou, Guinea. Humans in Africa were just as far off from the equilibrium point as in Asia, the study found.

Even when researchers switched matchers and mismatchers and tinkered with the rewards (matches on one side of the screen or bottle cap earned more), the results were consistent: Chimps play more like Nash predicted.

It's not that Nash (played by Russell Crowe in the 2001 feature film “A Beautiful Mind”) was wrong about humans and right about chimps. It's just that in certain strategic games the older species is quicker and perhaps more “economical” in its calculations.

“It seems like they're keeping better track of their opponents' previous choices,” said Colin Camerer, a California Institute of Technology behavioral economist.

Email Newsletters