FM75

I was not suggesting the use of par contracts or the determination of par contracts. The role of DD is to determine the likely score after the bidding has been modeled. This could be done on a scale that is statistically significant. I agree that 20,000 hands will not contain enough examples of "loose" preemptive bids for meaningful analysis. Bird and Anthias generated 100,000 deals that matched their auctions to determine the average suit distribution for each table position. They randomly selected 5,000 of those for double dummy analysis of opening leads. I am suggesting that this approach could be done fairly readily, with the caveat that the WS bidding needs to be modeled, and tested against various competitive auction strategies. The results of auctions meeting WS preempts can then compared with the results of other strategies on that set of deals. Ideally you program up the engine(s) and run them until you get enough results that the standard deviation of the differences starts to reach an asymptotic level.

The cat is out of the bag. or Post up buddy! (But no ads on the forum - what is the logic there? :) )

Ok - I have only one recommendation. Tell your granddaughter that she will be living on an island. I know that may sound obvious to you. But I used to work in NYC. You would be surprised at how many people commuting from Brooklyn and Queens thought that they were commuting to an island, but did not live on one!

If the point is to measure against top level opposition - and not a particular (top) pair's results against top level competition - then I recommend my second suggestion of simulation with DD results considering both vulnerability and form of competition. Top level pairs will most likely play closer to DD than random pairs.

First of all, I like your thinking. Just noticing this and posting it is pretty cool. If I could find a good bridge teacher, I would want one that forced me to think like this. I am not sure, from what you have mentioned, what "sample size" has to do with this problem. But it seems to me that the only thing that matters is the diamond suit. I am wondering if your analysis has ignored GIB's option of leading the ♦ 3 or 4. Does GIB, at trick two. have an intrafinesse (I just happened to be reading that section of Rodwell in the last 2 days) option up its sleeve in the trick 1/2 version. Does GIB's analysis in this version consider whether South covers a 7 with a missing intermediate card in some of those holdings? Opponents have 3 cards that beat the 7, and 4 that beat a small diamond. Is there a bug, in its trick 1/2 version? Finally, I think that your analysis is based on the 16 distributions to be of equal probability, when they are not. I regret that I do not have an answer, only further questions.

Is this about Woolsey? If you are interested only in how Woolsey - Stewart play, I think your approach is fatally flawed. The reason for this is simple. You are measuring the results of strategy A versus the results of strategy B. For strategy A - their bidding - you can collect as many examples as you want. Unfortunately you will have zero, or nearly zero, examples of the alternative strategy, played by them. So you will have no measurable difference between the two strategies, since the second is only hypothetical. (The question of Strategy A vs. B is important to W-S, but I would expect that they have not measured it themselves, and that their opinion is subject to the typical flaws of confirmation bias and other biases associated with not actually recording and measuring results.) Is this about ideal preemptive bidding? I presume that you really want to measure something equivalent to "what is the break-even point in scoring" for various levels of preempts, presuming good play by both pairs at the table. For this, you could try using a singular value decomposition of all played hands that you can collect - tens to hundreds of thousands - which will include hands that could have been preempted but weren't, assuming that your set will include all results of each board in competition. Of course, you will want to include position, vulnerability and the form of the game as variables. An alternative would be to generate your own data, similar to the approach chosen by Bird, Anthias in their recent publications. Generate random hands and assume that double dummy play will mirror actual results. I would recommend automation of the reporting, however. Their second book had many errors. In addition to automation of the reporting, full disclosure of the methods used would allow for independent study of the problem to confirm your results, as well as allow generating additional or fewer bidding systems, or even weighting of the frequency of other bidding systems. The difficulty of this approach is that you need to design competitive bidding strategies and apply them to the hands. You also have to include the results were preempts were made but did not win. Here, the double dummy assumption could potentially be a better mirror of real play, because the information provided by the preemptive bidding will probably more closely match double dummy results.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism Perhaps our system of education should promote educating ourselves. Being taught for 12-16 years is probably insufficient for a full career. This has probably been the case for decades already. People need to be able to learn by themselves. That means tracking down sources of knowledge new to them and learning from it. The sooner one learns to learn at one's own pace, mastering the subject being studied, the better that person will be able to do so as necessary or desired.

Welcome to the forum. Start here. Lots of resources. http://bilbridge.com/

deleted.

It is obviously cold looking at both hands. The question is whether you can determine the spade high cards. I suspect that there aren't any systems that can find AQJ and the ten. Partner holding the ten is about 25%. He has 2 of the unknown 8 cards. So you have a 16% possibility of finding spades 5-1 or 6-0. Even then, you only pick up the suit in about 25% of the cases - very roughly. So picking up 7N with 5,5,2,1 tricks off the top is about 88%. If he has the 9 (12.5%) you have a small chance of picking up the suit on a 5-1 split, if the 10 drops under the K for another 1% approximately. If that does not happen, you are looking at another 5% where the club K is onside and some chances on a squeeze. Seems like about 95% slam on methods that can find the top 3 missing spade honors. You will know that you are missing the club K.

Hmm. Random comments after revisiting the thread to see what the comments were. Two posters in an education topic, each of which apparently do not understand the difference between vocation and avocation. Sorry. Maybe just picking on vocabulary here. At least politics did not have anything to do with opinions on education. ROFL. Posted after reading page two. My previous comment still applies. Thanks to Onoway. Great post. Food for thought Does education suffer from the competing goals of distinguishing performance and "certifying" competence? By that I am suggesting that teachers on the one hand are charged with grading their students, but on the other hand, a realistic goal would be for a student to achieve competence in a subject - objectively measured. In the real world, competence is measured - licenses to drive, practice professions, etc. In education, IMO, competence is secondary to grading. Khan hit this on the head with his comment about bicycles and unicycles. How much do teachers matter? Not mentioned, as of page two - the limits to the ability of students to perform well is probably determined, in large measure, before they enter the formal educational system - pre-K and higher. There have been decades of research on this. The "educational complex" really does not want to accept this. To do so would clearly require accepting the statement that their role is secondary. They would prefer that we believe that somehow they can make up for socio-economic deficiencies in their "customers" (public).

Thanks for posting this. I have not taken the time to read the other comments in the thread. I have not seen anything about Khan Academy before this. It all makes tremendous sense. One thing that especially makes sense is kids teaching peers. That forces the kid teaching to learn it even better, because he has to explain it to match the learner's perspective. (from my own experience.)

Chat Assistant - sounds kind of like typewriter? Yes, I suppose people still use them. And quills with ink? Prepare your stuff in a text file, if you must, I guess, and copy/paste it into chat. Or better still go with audio support that BBO provides in the web, or use skype, etc. For prepared stuff - check out youtube.

Thanks for the answer. I guess I would agree with subsequent posters that the login should be secure. That said, access to the login would not seem to compromise anything but the username and password. If the login was secure, it potentially - and ironically - would have exposed whatever was in memory, as opposed to just being able to login (and change a password).

Answer to the title question - does not assume 2/1 1♣ precision 16+, not 4441 and 16-23 (Oliver Clarke variation) 2♣ 8+ and 5+ clubs 2♦ - control ask for aces and kings 2NT - 4 controls A=2, K=1 3♣ agrees trump and asks about club support (at this point p has AA or AKK) 3♠ 2 of 3 top honors and exactly 5 clubs (p known to be AQxxx) 4♦ control asking bid in diamonds 5♥ 1st and 3rd round control Ax, AQ(x)(x)(x) - this clarifies controls to A in each minor suit 5♠ control ask in spades with just barely enough room - responses of 5N= no control or 1st and 2nd, 6C = xx or Qxx, 6D = 2nd round control 5♦ - 2nd round control 7♣ - since ♠Kx(x) has already been eliminated partner has singleton spade Can count 1 spade, and 3 spade ruffs, 1 heart, 4 diamonds, 4 natural club tricks.

Face to face my partner failed to make a singleton lead in my suit. It was the only winning lead. 4th best was abysmal against ops that had bid suits before settling on NT. I needed two leads of my suit to set up the suit and had two entries. By the time I got to play the second entry, the running suit was exhausted. If you passed twice, GIB presumably leads against the most probable (or better, we hope, most profitable at the form of play). It might be that a singleton was the best lead. Guessing on that part. :)

If you want the answer to that, post the question on one of the BBO forums. They are vulnerable if people stored them on some other public site. If the question is a BBO security question, then it boils down to whether they used the affected versions of the OpenSSL software. Best advice. Just change your password. - (BBO bucks are not very fungible - so you probably have nothing to worry about.) But if they were vulnerable, they will remain vulnerable until they change the software version with which they built the system.

You have pretty much missed my point here - which is that stock trading - or selling merchandise online, auctioning off items on e-bay, etc. is a game. It is a multi-player game in which all participants know the rules, know what the penalties are for breaking them, etc. Whether the rules are set by a government, or by a private organization running the game is pretty much irrelevant. A further point is that even if the optimal strategy is difficult to determine - as it may have been for some in my example - once the strategy is known, you don't have to understand why it works to use it. Regardless of the mechanism of the game - it can be changed, by simply changing the rules - it must have players to be meaningful (successful), and those players must find it fair - or they won't play. Think of Nash Equilibrium like a system of predators and prey - where the prey survive on grass. If the prey are excessively available, and predators are successful at eating and mating, they could reach a point where the prey are all eaten and the predators die. OTOH, if the predators are too rare, then the prey starves from lack of grass. If you attempt to oversimplify the problem by looking at only the strategies of one side, you lose. If you fail to recognize that they are looking at your strategies, you lose.

Google - hoogle Talking science here, not just popular search answers. Search "modes of infectious disease transmission" Then you have to look deeper. If you blindly "google' Giardiasis, you will likely figure that it is important to carry a filter with you when camping. In truth, you have been sold a bill of goods by a vendor selling water filters. You are way more likely to suffer from the disease from a baby pool than natural water sources, AND, the disease is rarely accurately diagnosed, which can only be done by tracing the infection back to its source. If you touch an "infected door handle", you have to pick your nose, etc. afterwards to become infected yourself. So clean your hands before picking your nose, or sucking your thumb, or sticking your fingers or thumb in other "body cavities"!

The questions here are: 1) Does God want you to win? 2) Does God know your choice (is really omniscient even about the future)? It does not matter, if he does. 3) Are you properly informed about the conditions of the contest - (God's agent (perhaps) told you about the new rules...) As we go down an interesting Game Theory Tangent - not worrying about the original topic...

PEBCAK - Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. It is a common situation, especially experienced (and ultimately recognized) by programmers. The clue here might have been 0, 1 instead of 0, 100.

I am passing. LOTT (as my excuse - or support - as it works out). The same problem likely exists at the other table. If the state of the match is "even to slightly unclear". I want to defend.

Sheesh! Get a life! Flu (influenza) is normally transmitted via aerosols - sneezing and coughing as the non-technical description (viruses or bacteria reach you lungs or mucous membranes in your nose). There are very few mechanisms for transmission of disease. Washing your hands has nothing to do with flu. How does washing hands work? Well if you are a surgeon, it helps to avoid transferring viruses or bacteria into a patient. The same holds for dentists and nurses, except they all use antiseptic gloves these days anyway. So what does washing your hands do for you? It helps prevent transferring germs to someone else that shakes hands with you. But just shaking hands is no big deal. So long as that person does not reasonably soon, thereafter, pick his nose, rub his eyes, or in some other way touch mucous membranes, open wounds, or body parts equivalent, that person is safe. When should you wash your hands? If you are (excessively) worried about "germs", wash your hands before sucking your thumb, sticking your hands in your mouth, picking your nose, or rubbing your eyes or other orifices that we don't need to mention.

You posted my question even before I sent it to you!

Board 64.. What was the score after 48? What do we estimate the score is to this board? What would p, X, 4N be in our PA?