CarlRitner

The Bridge World Volumes are all gone. Thanks to all. World Championship books are still available at $5 each. 1980-85-86-87-88-89

Say you have AK987 in dummy, Jx in your hand. This is a side suit and you need 4 tricks and no losers in a trump contract. Understanding this statement is problematic for me. If I need 4 tricks and no losers, can I afford to lose one trick or not? "No losers" implies I need to win all 5 tricks. "Need 4 tricks" implies I can have one loser.

I find a squeeze play harder than an endplay. The robots do not find any play difficult or easy; they either find them (via simulation) or they do not find them.

If we assume, as part of the original question, that their partnership can 1) bid the grand slam, and 2) also play (declare) perfectly, then yes, you can use the double dummy tool to determine this. Otherwise, a statistical review (e.g. BridgeBrowser/BBO Records) would be in order. I'd be curious how close/far apart those two numbers are.

Good to hear from you you again, RW. It's good advice you offer. Any "expert" bidding program is going to need, at a minimum, as complete a bidding database as possible. And each bid sequence is going to need as disciplined a definition as possible. Each hole in the system will degrade its value many times more than simply a less than optimal definition. The above project turned out to be more than I could handle, alone. Every time I got someone else motivated to help, they got a little ways into it and then wanted to make changes to the system. Changes for the better, I do not doubt, but the ripple effect created more work in the "to finish" pile than it generated in the "done" pile. I can imagine the challenges having a team working on this would present. In the end I gave it up, started playing bridge again, and lived happily ever after. Sort of.

Don't want to argue it, Free, but GIBson is the GIB single dummy solver and it kicks in around trick 4. Kurt Schneider has built a single dummy solver that can process several hands in an hour, not sure exactly what the time is on it, but his kicks in at trick 1. Are we talking the same animal here, I wonder? I'll try to find the most recent thread on this over at rgb and post a link.

Good idea. For bidding, it should be fairly simple to feed it all the Bridge World MSC and the Bulletin IYC problems for the last 10 years and get a baseline on that. IYC usually features one computer bridge program every month, it had been Bridge Baron for a while and now it's Bridge Buff.

What makes this difficult to judge, in my opinion, is that you must play GIB's system, period. There can be NO partnership agreements other than what GIB does in the bidding. Not what it SAYS it does, but what it actually does, what it would do playing with another GIB. Playing with an average expert, you'll go over your system notes and agree to things, and the expert will agree to play your way in certain areas, because he knows a less than optimal agreement is 100 times better than any implicit disagreement. GIB makes no such concession, and as a result, You & GIB are going to be less effective than GIB & GIB. What is clear is that there are so many fewer rules to write for constructive (uncontested) auctions, and fewer chances for misunderstandings.

Look at Bob Richardson's program, Bridge Captain (used to be Bridge mate). That database is completely configurable by the end user and it's written in a script format that is easy for anyone exposed to any basic programming language to grasp and use. I was able to incorporate Marty Bergen's 5-card Stayman into the program with a moderate effort. The drawback is a limited set of tools for writing rules, but an experienced programmer should be able to add more tools by modifying the executable code (in theory, of course, you would be best off asking Bob's permission and help there). Bobby Goldman, author of Aces Scientific, wrote in that book that the better and tighter the set of rules governing the bids are, the less the team needs to rely on individual judgment, or something very much along those lines. Aces Scientific (the Advanced leaf) looks to be a very rigid, tight system, and since the modern 2/1 GF shares a lot with this system, that book (hard to find and hard to read) might offer a better starting point than Roman club.

Exactly. What we need here are two things. The first is a rigid standard for describing bids within a system, rigid enough to eliminate as much ambiguity as possible, yet something most non-programmers can use. The full disclosure program is a great start, but as you pointed out, it needs a way to add hierarchy, or rules based on generalities. Even with this added flexibility, you are going to require a very large number of rules to handle just 1NT and the next three bids. I've tried this and I keep having to go back and rework 1NT - 2C because that can include anything from a bust hand that will pass anything by opener, all the way up to a known slam. The second thing you need is a program to read the above rigidly defined and formatted bidding rules into a pre-compiler or iterative compiler. You only need a small core team of people to have the knowledge to deal with this, although there will be a lot of back and forth with the rules for writing and the rules for compiling, until you work out something that covers it all. I have worked with the GIB source code and while it is nearly undecipherable by the average bridge enthusiast, it compiles iteratively into an apparently compact and fast hybrid between a database and executable script. That's likely a sloppy technical description; the bottom line is that something like this is workable IF you can develop a front end like Full Disclosure. This is what Nelson Ford was working on, although his database was more like a set of convention cards you fill out, a full data sheet for every bid. I don''t think he had any generalized rules that the specific datasheets filtered through. When I was very active on my own program, I tried to incorporate a lot of flexibility into bid definitions, by greatly expanding the convention card, so that the end user could specify so many more things about each bid shown. Had I continued, I think I would have ended up with an immensely complicated front end for the end user, and a simplified rule processor for the program itself. Something tells me this is the way to go if you can assemble a large enough team of convention card / datasheet / full disclosure rule writers, all on the same page. That is a totally different challenge than writing the rules processor. I think it's the bigger challenge.

You can contact Nelson ford at nford@mail.cswnet.com if he's still around. He released the program and database to anyone willing to help. When working on my own bidding program, Project 6, I set an early requirement that every bid had to have a definition or explanation that could be given to both computer and human competitors. So I set about writing a complete system description. That activity showed me the incredible expanse of usable bids. The total number of possible bids is some ridiculously large number and while I knew that 99.99999% were never needed, that left way too many for me to deal with. And that was using NO alternate conventions (no leafs). I found myself stuck in the "land of opening bids" for so long I realized the only way I could ever finish was with an incomplete (or misleading) database, and that discouraged me enough to shelve the project.

Mike Lawrence has a CDROM called Two Over One that covers the meat of the system. I found it to be clear and easy to read, and easy to follow. He has a few ideas that are different than the way I learned the system, but he usually convinces me that his way works at least as well. http://www.michaelslawrence.com/ Definitely worth taking a look.

Look for posts by Nelson Ford on rgb. He developed a bidding database that would permit people from all over the world to contribute to. While bidding can be helped by simulation, it is pretty much rule based, since every bid is supposed to be bounded, and needs to have a definition and an explanation for the opponents. Otherwise it just is not bridge. I think the project fell apart when nobody could agree on one standard system to program to, like SAYC. That in itself would require manhours in the millions (my guess) but each variation you add increases the effort geometrically. Programs like GIB can probably be enhanced to expert level for card play. For bidding, you need the definitions for each usable sequence, and for an expert system, there are too many (again, my guess).

Did you ever have any luck with this? I would also be interested in reading the article.

Maybe this needs to be a separate topic, since it is generating no interest within this one?

I am curious to see what a proper structure looks like. The Complete Guide to Contested Auctions (Lawrence & Leong) looked pretty close to me.

I like everything from Mike Lawrence. I like the 2/1 almost Game Force books and I like the 2/1 Game Force software. I also like the Hardy bidding structure, but not his earlier books. The two new ones by Hardy (Standard - Green) and (Advanced - Purple) have been thoroughly rewritten (or at least highly edited) and are probably the best books you are going to find for his particular style. I cannot keep those books in stock. Thurston's book is extremely well written but I would not consider it advanced, which is what the original poster expressed interest in.

Quite right. We found that running a small notice in the ACBL Bulletin was more effective than a mass mailing. Hopefully we'll do the same thing this time around.

OK, I understand it better now. In my case, I've bought books through their website, and I assumed they got my name that way. I sell books for the ACBL and they won't give me a mailing list. So I sort of doubt it's them.

I get that email every once in a while, maybe three or four times a year. Since I am interested in bridge, and especially bridge books, it doesn't bother me at all. I am a little surprised to hear that it's considered annoying. Disclaimer: I have no association with the author or the website.

Have you looked at the scheme in Marty Bergen's older book, "Better Bidding with Bergen, Part 1" where 1NT-2C is the simple 4-card Stayman and 1NT-3C is the game forcing 5-card Stayman? That fulfills 2. and 3. above, although you lose whatever you have assigned to 1NT-3C. If that's 5-5 invitational in the minors, it's your decision if the gain is worth it. For me it is.

BSC = 2.4 Brown Sticker Conventions and Treatments

The other huge difference is in what a chess move means versus what a bridge bid means. There is no ambiguity in a chess move. A bishop on a square is very easy to represent in memory. 1H - 2C means different things in different systems and to different pairs within a system. It is quite difficult to represent the range of hands responder holds unless there exists a way to fully describe the bidding system for each pair. Imagine chess where each player starts out his pieces on random squares, with a wall between the board halves.

Partner knows my strength to withing one point, now he wants to know about my shape. Given that he's short in my two chunky suits, I will show my preference to spades. He's the captain, it's his move.

Wow, thanks. Now my eye goes to the author where it should go. The service around here is .... impressive!