rfaronson

Your AI is broken. When it decides that the proper thing to do is to ruff a suit, but there is a prior ruff ahead of it and it cannot overruff, then it will underuff. That often costs a needless trick. As I was the bridge designer and programmer for The Sierra Network and Hoyle Classic Bridge, I know a fair about about bridge AI. I've tried reporting bugs through your bug report staff and the last one told me to take it to the forums. It's obvious you have little interest in improving your bot play, but some of these bugs are egregious enough to make me try. Your random number generator is also clearly off. Your bidding often incorrectly describes the bid. If a description says 4+ cards in a suit, If your bidding says 7+ points in response to my bid, it can NOT count short suit points for a stiff or a void in my opened suit. If the hand is too weak to bid over my first named suit or my second named suit, it is FAR to weak to bid a new suit when I rebid one of my suits in passout position, forcing me up another level because my void won't play well opposite the AI's weak six card suit. For that matter, if I bid two a second suit instead of reopening with a double, I CANNOT HAVE four card support for the AI's newly introduced suit in an auction like: 1H - 2C - P - P 2D - 3C - P - P 3H - P -- 3S I've seen the AI bid 3S on fewer than 4 HCP with a suit when there aren't enough cards in my hand to have sufficient support given the ten red cards I am already showing. And these are just off the top of my head. I have a log file of many significant bugs that I'm not bothering to report because I have not received a single reply indicating BBO cares to fix these bugs. Yours truly, Richard Aronson

BBO's timer to test whether I have stopped playing has been broken for months. It comes up even if I'm in the middle of playing a hand in a BBO tournament. I try to report bugs to your technical staff and they just point me to the Forums. I was the bridge designer and programmer for The Sierra Network and Hoyle Classic Bridge, so I know a fair bit about bridge AI and online bridge. Please fix it. It can come up inappropriately and really harm my play.