RossSCann

Pin money. My program is BridgeMentor free download trial from my site www.bridgegame.com Teaching program for beginners. Several hundred thousand lines of bid and play help txt. The single dummy solver is a function called for a certain class of NT hands. It was created to deal with a Frank Stewart newspaper column hand. My logic uses hundreds of Frank Stewart columns with changes to avoid any copyright issues. He is a good source of stuff for beginners. Lots of Eddie Kantar hands as well froom his books. This is a retirement hobby work in progress. However, thousands of copies sold over the years from the free trial. Fred Gittleman once emailed me that he liked the program. But it is just a hobby project. The problem of dealing with any random hand with good play and help text is a lot of work. I have looked at and coded for more than 10,000 hands, a drop in the bucket of the 10 to the 27th possible.

Thanks, How did you direct output away from the screen to file(s). That is what I would need, plus file input of the hands, of course. Ross No longer a problem. I now have the Haglund double doummy dll working great. Nice code. I will use standard opening leads immediately follwed by his analysis. I expect to prune his search a lot for speed, eliminating outcomes of no interest for my purposes.

Thanks. No I don't have any intentions to sell my program if I can get it working in a useful fashion to provide really good analysis of bid questios with a really easy to use GUI. I would post it for free download on my web site if there is interest. I downloaded his dll and was pleased to have it compile immediately with only one name space conflict, which is amazing since I have more tha 3000 variable/function names, all bridge related.

Thanks Stephen, I really did not want to do the work myself. I have done a single dummy function which is limited to NT contracts of a certain class and it was hard to do. It finds a can't be defeated line of play to make the contract against any lie of the cards. It is in my program but very seldom comes up in random hands. I really don't like it because the help text for the user is not informative. "Play this card now or the defense may defeat your contract." Especially when it is the card to be played from dummy on the opening lead. Really especially when that card is not a likely choice. Have you ever evaluated Haglund's executable? I assume you think it is good by your reference to it. What other source code projects, if any, do you know of in this domain? i.e. Line of play % evaluation using simulation against all possible lies of the cards, based on bidding, for example? i.e. Brute force Monte Carlo simulation analysis. If this isn't available I will have to do it since we now have massively parallel multi-threading available to deal with the combinatorial explosion problem. Best, Ross

Any one here know of open source projects for C/C++ for single or double dummy play (not bidding). I doubt there is any hope for single-dummy because if it's any good it is worth a lot of money. I have written one and it is making money. Double dummy however, must be available somewhere because it has no significant commercial value. I don't want to write my own if I can avoid it. I need this for my project to build a good program to analyze alternative bid panel questions which I have discussed in another thread in this forum. I also now realize I can use it to improve my existing single-dummy logic.

Yes, 16 cases out 500 have 5 Clubs. I wiil look at those. I don't care if anyone else uses my program, I am interested in competing with others interested in this development issue. The idea that bid decisions in the panels in the Bulletin are scored by "informed judgement" strikes me as nonsense, for want of a better means. But then I was trained as a scientist. I will try to get source code for GIB to be used only for non-comercial purposes.

Maybe some contact can gin up a version of GIB that will run from a file N hands, per any file format GIB wants, and print results to a text file. This is really probably very simple to code if they have decent function architecture. Or maybe they would realease source code.

I don't expect my program to stand up well against professional products. I am an 80 year old programming hobbyist and low intermediate level bridge player. However, on large samples my program might yield similar results in total because of 2nd rate declarer play facing 2nd rate defense. Dealing with random deals on a single dummy basis is really hard programming. Nobody is ever going to write code capable of expert play because the effort that would be required can'r be justified on a cost/benefit basis. A DeepFineese approach using standard opening leads might work, however as a more accurate equivalent of expert play. My program has 280,000 lines of C++ code dealing single dummy play and that is just scratching the surface of what would be needed for advamced play/defense. I wonder if any of the commercial programs have the facility to play an input file of N hands and print summary results? If you do get the time to run your challenge match you should publish it here. If anyone has a contact with one or more of the commercial programs you should ask them to make available a version that can run from an input file of N hands and print the results. The coding to do this would be trivial. There would be no reason to incorporate such a feature in their commercial product, but they could put the version on their web site if they are not afraid of the competition. They could even do it as a console app for simplicity, with no other capability than running the file of N hands and displaying results.

By ease od input I do mean as simple as possible GUI. I certainly agree my program has play problems. What is the best single dummy play program available today. I will buy it and test it against my results. It may not be much different than my results but we have to test it to see. Thanks for the instruction on formatting spaces.

As everyone agrees opening leads are hard. My logic has around 500 different leads based on the bidding and West's hand (S is decl). I got almost all of them from books on defense, Root, Kantar, etc. I would guess that is 20% of what would be required to equal the leads made by an expert. However, as noted above, double-dummy opening leads would not make sense in determining how a given hand plays out. On the other hand my 500 probably covers more than 80% of all random deals. I would love it if some experts would go through the random deals my program generates and see which opening leads they disagree with. Also, my posting of details is coming out very messy because the fromating is getting garbled. I have to learn how to maintain the formating when adding to this forum.

All the final contracts after the 2H rebid by responder are 2H's or 2S's. Obviously after pass all the contracts are 1 NT. I will post details of all the results per the cloud suggestion above. I hope to develop my program into a useful tool for analysis if I can, so contructive review will be very helpful. As far as I can tell no such tool now exists with easy user input of the bidding question to be analyzed. One big question I have is whether to just use the play and defense logic in my program, or get something like "Deep Finesse," which considers the hidden cards.

Good suggestions. I didn't know about the free cloud posting sites. I do have all the data you suggest re: distribution and tricks taken, etc. The bidding is set to that which Frank Stewart uses for his colum i.e. simple. For example 1 NT opening 16-18 HCPts. This is a work in progress so I am anxious for constructive criticism.

A couple of months ago I posted the bidding question below from Frank Stewart's daily column I am modifying my bridge program to analyze alternative bids for 500 random deals; At the time it seemed to me (low intermediate player) that the best bid would be to pass I ran an analysis that confirmed my thought. A number of readers protested, some violently, saying everyone knows you bid 2 H's Well, there was a bug in my program. After various distractions I have gotten back to the issue, with the following new results. 2 H's wins by a small amount at MP's. [hv=pc=n&s=sjt652hqjt9d7ck42&d=n&v=0&b=1&a=1dp1sp1np]133|200[/hv] Alternative rebids by South are 2 H's or Pass Total Score Top Boards Key bid 1 2H 2228 240 Key bid 2 Pass 3846 228 Flat boards 32 Distribution of High Card Points For North - Number of Hands 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 0 128 498 274 78 22 If anyone wants to look at any of the 500 random hands I can email a file. I am interested in the topic of analyzing alternative bids by generating a large number of random hands to see the result. Results for 500 good cases for another run w/ more detail Dealer N opens 1 D and S responds 1 S, N now bids 1 Nt: Key bids are 2 H's or Pass Total Score Top Boards Key bid 1 2H 2860 249 Key bid 2 Pass 3900 217 Flat boards 34 Distribution of High Card Points For North - Number of Hands 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 0 122 514 269 74 23 Distribution of Imps Won - Number of Boards Imps 2H Pass 1 98 25 2 54 7 3 14 8 4 0 0 5 33 39 6 17 35 7 14 26 8 8 14 9 4 6 10 4 3 11 2 1 12 1 0 13 0 0 14 0 0 Total 787 857 Contracts Reached After Bid Choice One 2H Declarer Bid Suit Made Cases South 2 Heart 2 91 South 2 Spade 2 84 South 2 Spade -1 62 South 2 Heart 3 60 South 2 Spade 3 53 South 2 Heart -1 51 South 2 Spade -2 31 South 2 Heart -2 21 South 2 Heart 4 13 South 2 Spade -3 10 South 2 Spade 4 7 South 2 Heart 5 4 South 2 Heart -3 3 South 2 Heart -4 2 North 3 Notrump 3 2 North 3 Notrump -1 1 South 2 Spade -5 1 North 3 Notrump 5 1 North 2 Notrump 3 1 North 2 Notrump -1 1 North 2 Notrump 2 1 Contracts Reached After Bid Choice Two Pass Declarer Bid Suit Made Cases North 1 Notrump 1 179 North 1 Notrump 2 109 North 1 Notrump -1 94 North 1 Notrump 3 55 North 1 Notrump -2 36 North 1 Notrump 4 13 North 1 Notrump -3 9 North 1 Notrump -4 2 North 1 Notrump 5 2 North 1 Notrump -6 1 Distribution of North Hands Number of Cases Spades Hearts Diamonds Clubs 85 3 3 4 3 71 2 3 5 3 64 2 4 4 3 43 2 3 4 4 40 2 4 5 2 31 3 3 5 2 26 3 2 5 3 24 3 2 4 4 23 3 4 4 2 22 1 4 4 4 14 2 2 5 4 13 2 2 4 5 10 4 3 4 2 8 1 4 5 3 6 4 4 3 2 5 1 3 5 4 5 4 2 4 3 4 1 3 4 5 4 4 2 5 2 2 1 2 5 5

I downloaded and extracted but it wouldn't work. It said it was missing a .dll but that dll was clearly present. It is unfortnately written in some obscure script language. We should be working in C++. Ross

Yes, I agree. There were definite problems with my logic in this sequence which I am fixing.