Joseph-Sifreid Duplessis was the official court painter to Louis XVI. He painted Julie Le Brun, daughter of the more famous portrait painter Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, in 1787, two years before the French Revolution. Julie is examining herself in a hand mirror — young, unselfconscious, genuinely interested in what the mirror shows her. The painting captures the pure version of self-examination before vanity became the standard interpretation.
The Rock Paper Scissors question the painting poses is a real one: against an opponent who knows everything you know, shares every tendency you have, and has the exact same behavioral patterns, who wins?
The theoretical answer is that the game is perfectly tied. You can't exploit conditional response patterns in someone who has exactly the same conditional response patterns you do. You can't read tells that mirror your own tells exactly. The expected value is precisely 50/50 across infinite throws.
The practical answer is more interesting. Playing yourself in the mirror reveals your behavioral defaults in a way that playing against opponents doesn't. When you beat yourself, you see what you were about to throw. When you lose to yourself, you see that your mirror self read you before you read it. The game becomes a diagnostic tool for your own patterns rather than an exploitation of someone else's.
This is one of the ways serious competitive players practice: by becoming familiar enough with their own tendencies to recognize them in real time and interrupt them. The mirror is the most honest opponent available. It knows exactly as much as you do, which is more than most players admit they know about themselves at the table.
Duplessis painted Julie with genuine warmth. The reflection she's examining isn't idealized. It's accurate. That's the valuable kind of self-examination in Rock Paper Scissors too.