Georges Seurat was twenty-five when he began A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and twenty-seven when he finished it. He died in 1891 at thirty-one, leaving behind a body of work that included perhaps a dozen major paintings and established Pointillism — the technique of building images from small, distinct dots of pure color — as one of the defining innovations of Post-Impressionism.
The technique is laborious in a specific way: each mark is small and by itself communicates almost nothing. The orange vendor on the riverbank in La Grande Jatte is made of dots of orange and yellow and the shadows that give her form. At close range she is an organized collection of marks. At viewing distance she is a person.
The relevance to Rock Paper Scissors is in the accumulative nature of reading. You don't read an opponent from a single throw. One Rock tells you almost nothing — the statistical baseline is 35.4% Rock for first throws across competitive play, which means a first-throw Rock is barely above chance. But three rounds build a pattern. Five rounds build a behavioral profile. Ten rounds confirm tendencies that are genuinely exploitable. The individual data point is a dot of paint. The match-length picture is what resolves into something readable.
Seurat understood that the eye finishes the work. He trusted the viewer's visual system to complete the image from the raw material he provided. Competitive RPS players do the same with behavioral data: each observation is incomplete, and the full picture assembles over the course of the match.
La Grande Jatte is at the Art Institute of Chicago. It's surrounded, on most days, by crowds that mirror the crowds in the painting itself.