Chimps Outperform Humans in Simple Contests

Chimps at the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute consistently outperform humans in simple contests drawn from game theory, reveals a new study.

The study, led by Colin Camerer, Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics, has found that in a simple game of hide-and-seek that researchers call the Inspection Game, performance of the chimps was far more impressive: they learned the game rapidly and nearly attained the predictions of the Nash theorem for optimal play, while humans they played reasonably well, slowly learning to predict opponent choices, but they did not play optimally.