Suggestion - GIB enhancement...

[rmunson1]

GIB can sit at the table and play with you. Alternatively, GIB can sit over your shoulder and watch you play all 4 hands, showing you which cards will lead to success/defeat at any point in time. This post is to suggest/request an enhancement that is already embedded in GIB:

Provide a hand with vulnerability and bidding up to 'this point' and find out what GIB would bid (optionally GIB could say they would not have bid like you forced them to bid on the prior bidding!)?

One could argue that human bidding is better than robot bidding - ask a panel of experts and get the 'real answer to the 'best bid' at this point in the auction. And it would be hard to argue with that.

 

Still, David Bird opened some eyes with his books on opening leads. Rather than using human judgment/experience, he used robots to lead every card in the hand and then play out the hand, double dummy, and find the leads that work best. I know some people who still do not believe/buy into what was published in David Bird's books. But I do.

 

I don't know the internals to GIB, but I believe, at any point in the auction, the 'next bid' is based on a combination of some bidding rules as well as some computer simulation of what the other hands are likely to look like and, therefore, what bid would work best.

 

With this tool, GIB could enter "It's Your Call" in the ACBL Bulletin or "Master Solvers" in The Bridge World, or even bid both sides as in "The Bidding Box" or "Challenge the Champs". By comparing GIB results with expert panels one could...

• Improve GIB's bidding after learning about better bids
  
• Improve expert bidding by learning, via simulation, that there is a better way
  
• Ignore the results because robots aren't 'real bridge' and the quality of the answer is sufficiently suspect to be worthless
  

 

Clearly, the problem that bridge players try to solve with each deal/hand is finding the best answer for this hand. Via experience, better play occurs over time (for most). But, David Bird's point was that you won't get 'this' hand with this auction 5000 times in a lifetime to learn the best lead through experience. Why not use a computer simulation to see, over 5000 deals, which lead works best (given this hand and this auction)?

 

What I am asking/suggesting is that computer simulation has already been invented/implemented, but use it for bidding as well as leads. Given 'this' hand and bidding, what is the best next bid? With this tool that I am proposing, create an enhanced GIB so that a player can: open the enhanced GIB, enter their hand and the bidding, and let GIB tell them what GIB would bid next. You could use a Bridgewinners poll or a variety of other options to answer this same question, but having GIB do it would provide an additional point of view. In fact, there are so many bidding polls on Bridgewinners, GIB could be set up to put in their 2 cents on each poll on Bridgewinners!

 

Thoughts?

[smerriman]

Provide a hand with vulnerability and bidding up to 'this point' and find out what GIB would bid (optionally GIB could say they would not have bid like you forced them to bid on the prior bidding!)?

It's actually possible to do this part already, just a bit awkward - you can create a bidding table with a robot partner, predeal the hands, jump between the seats (undoing partner's bid where necessary) to get the bidding up to the right point, then see what GIB bids next.

[rmunson1]

Thanks for the suggestion - I'm embarrassed to post back, but to execute your suggestion, I need help. I started with BBO Help which has a huge number of help categories, but none of them include 'create a bidding table with a robot partner'. I possibly also need help with 'predeal the hands' as well as 'jump between seats'.

 

Other than being cumbersome (and having the skills to accomplish it), everything about your reply sounds perfect. Thanks for the reply. If you could also coach me in the steps, it would be appreciated.

[smerriman]

This is what I do:

 

Practice - Start a bidding table

Choose whether you want the opponents to pass always, or control their bids (can change later via Table button)

Sit in South, click Robot for North

Click Deal Source

Select the dealer under General

Under Advanced, check Use this input for Dealer program

In the box fill in any hands that you want to fix (normally just north + south), one per line, in the format:

 

predeal south SAK874, HAK2, D9, CT42

 

Hit close, hit redeal

 

Bid as South, and you'll see how North bids. If you want to change one of North's bids, click on your name, leave the seat, remove the robot, sit North, undo, bid, and then go back.

[rmunson1]

Wow, thanks for the incredibly clear and detailed instructions. Rather painless. And, as you note, this technique completely solves the problem I posed.

 

I don't know if you are familiar with 'Lead Captain'? It is software that attempts to put "David Bird's book" into an app.

http://www.bridgecaptain.com/LeadCaptain.html

 

Anyway, rather than give a single answer (lead this), the app gives a table that shows the results of leading any/every card in the hand and allows you to see over an arbitrary number of hand simulations (David Bird used 5000 simulations) how successful each lead would be. You can then see that the 'best lead' is the one that worked the highest percentage of the time.

 

What I would like to see, some day, is something similar to Lead Captain, where you could input a choice of 3 bids for this hand (or let "GIB" name the choices), and then 'software' could run a simulation, similar to Lead Captain, which would conclude the bidding. Then the software would play the hand double dummy to its logical conclusion. The result would look like this:

Bid 1 - arrived in successful part score a%, arrived in successful game b%, arrived in successful slam c%, arrived in contract that went down d%

Bid 2 - "

Bid 3 - "

 

Your instructions clearly answered how I would accomplish the stated question that I initially posed. And, for the hand that I had in question, I learned what GIB would bid.

 

I'm probably not stating my problem very well (or my "solution"), but I'm thinking there is an opportunity to learn more about bidding using computers just like, for me, I learned more about leading using computer simulations via David Bird.