Do you know much about game theory? Specifically, the Nash equilibrium, the situation in which two players arrive and remain at their optimal strategies in a non-cooperative game? Of course not, at least not outside of what you learned in econ 101 and/or by watching A Beautiful Mind. It turns out, however, that scientists at Caltech have found a species that understands game theory very well: Pan troglodytes, otherwise known as the chimpanzee.

In the study, researchers pitted pairs of chimps and pairs of humans against one another in a sort of “hide and seek” game. With their backs turned, the “hider” would select one of two squares on a screen, while the “seeker” would try to guess where their counterpart was hiding. Because they lack a thirst for excitement (or possibly to preserve the study’s scientific validity), participants were only paired with members of their own species.

Humans, as one might expect, did alright: Over time, they were able to learn their opponents patterns, improving at the game but never quite achieving Nash equilibrium for optimal play. The chimps, on the other hand, rapidly adjusted and were able to achieve optimality, even when researchers added catches to the game like lopsided rewards for certain actions. When the game changed, the chimps changed with it.

Should this lead you to fear a chimp uprising, take heart: While the researchers are still unsure as to why chimps outperform humans, their best guess is that it’s actually a good thing. In chimp society, competition is far more important than in that of humans. From a young age, chimps learn to compete with one another by wrestling, playing hide and seek, etc. Humans, on the other hand, are a far more cooperative species. We rely on our language abilities to pool our resources to achieve greater things than we would in a more competitive landscape. Still, it’s an interesting insight into how we might survive if forced to live by chimpanzee standards.

“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,” explains Caltech graduate student and coauthor Rahul Bhui.