Cache previous actions in robot tournaments

[slar]

I was surprised to find that the robots in the robot duplicate don't bid consistently. I don't know if this link is viewable by you guys with the new security rules

http://www.bridgebase.com/myhands/hands.php?traveller=4454-1435802041-33713758

but what happened is that I was dealt 26 HCP and opened 3NT. For whatever reason, my bot with 1HCP and 5 hearts transferred to hearts. Most of the bots passed the 3NT opener! Since this was a matchpoint game, it led to a fairly big swing.

How about making actions more deterministic? I understand that the bots run some kind of simulation before acting. However, I'd like to think that in a robot tournament, these actions could be cached somehow so that everyone plays under the same conditions. For each unique situation, run the simulation once and provide the result upon request. It seems to me that it would save computing power as well.

[1eyedjack]

I don't know if this link is viewable by you guys with the new security rules

Your fears are well founded. Your link just produces a page showing a "link" to the traveller but it is not a hyperlink.

 

Was this an "Instant" tourney?

[slar]

Was this an "Instant" tourney?

 

No, ACBL Robot Duplicate.

 

The point of me posting the traveller is so that you could see that a number of players got different bidding sequences.

[barmar]

This problem should be fixed. When we upgraded the robots a few weeks ago, one of the servers was missed, so it was still running GIB v33.

 

slar, be on the lookout for some BB$ in gratitude for discovering this error.

 

Caching wouldn't have solved this. We have multiple servers running the robot software, so a cached result on one machine would not be used on another machine (unless we implement an elaborate protocol for sharing the results among all the servers).