A study of chimps by Kyoto University Primate Research Institute and published June 5th in the online publication Scientific Reports, advocates chimps consistently demonstrated strategic thinking skills superior to their human counterparts.

In the game, seated back-t0-back, pairs of competitors  were asked to select one of two boxes on the right or left side of a computer screen. Over the course of 200 rounds, one competitor was asked to select the box their partner would choose, the other was tasked with preventing their opponent from guessing correctly. The winners were rewarded with a prize; a chunk of apple for the chimps and a coin for the humans.

According to researchers the game replicates daily, real-life situations. For example, in the case of, “an employee who wants to work only when her employer is watching and prefers to play video games when unobserved, to better conceal her secret video game obsession, the employee must learn the patterns of the employer’s behavior—when they might or might not be around to check up on the worker. Employers who suspect their employees are up to no good, however, need to be unpredictable, popping in randomly to see what the staff is doing on company time,” according to a statement.

Game theorists argue that, if both opponents play strategically, limitations exist as to how often a player can win. That limit is described as the “Nash equilibrium,” named for the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences winner, John Forbes Nash Jr. Nash, also the subject of the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind.

“The nice thing about the game theory used in this study is that it allows you to boil down all of these situations to their strategic essence,” explained study coauthor Rahul Bhui.

Similarly, the humans in the test performed as expected. Their abilities slowly improved, but they finished well below the Nash equilibrium. The chimpanzees, on the other hand, learned the game and improved rapidly. Ultimately, they played close to Nash’s defined optimal level. The chimps’ performance continued to be impressive even as changes, such as role switching within the game and increased rewards, were introduced.

The test was repeated with chimps and humans in Bossou, Guinea. For this test, the players turned a bottle cap right side up or upside down instead of using computers. The results were very similar to the Kyoto experiment with the chimpanzees outperforming the humans by a considerable margin.

The researchers do not know why the chimps performed as well as they did compared to humans. It could possibly have something to do with the chimpanzees having short-term memory skills superior to those of humans.

It is more likely, however, that it has to do with the fundamental differences that separated humans from chimpanzees four to five million years ago.

Chimpanzees are generally more competitive than humans are. Chimpanzees maintain a constantly shifting social “status and dominance” hierarchy. The game also did not make use of language, a highly developed fundamental skill in humans.

“While young chimpanzees hone their competitive skills with constant practice, playing hide-and-seek and wrestling, their human counterparts shift at a young age from competition to cooperation using our special skill at language,” explained study leader Colin Camerer.

The “cognitive tradeoff hypothesis,” another possible explanation, identifies the brain growth and specialization that created human cognitive capacities such as language, as the very reasons why we  view situations such as the “inception game” more abstractly than chimpanzees.