Bridge!

[prog]

I have recently discovered Bridge -- learning the basics at Origins and the rest from friends at HoRGN -- and am surprised at how enjoyable and addicting I find it. Since my last game against humans, I have been playing Freeverse Software's version of it.

I just now beat it 6 times in a row, and suspect that I can more or less continue to do so at this point. (Even though I still don't quite get how scoring works.) According to mrmorse, it's difficult to program a good Bridge AI, mostly because of the difficulty in codifying the bidding process, which takes a level of subtle communication skill that only us wetware types can easily pull off, for now. Hmm... I'm not sure what to think about this postulation, but it is true that my compu-partner tends to pass after I change suits from her opening bid, which I am led to understand is (as Mr. Morse once told me) WRONG! WRONG!! WRONG!!! The THEM players tend to overbid a lot, too, trying for slams with every other hand it seems.

It has built-in network play which I haven't really tried yet. The one time I logged into it (as zendonut) a stranger asked me to join and I got skeert and run away. Maybe later.

(A pause here to tip my hat to Freeverse, whose card games I have been playing for exactly 10 years now. In fact, I think their implementation of Hearts was the first shareware game I ever paid for, in the summer of 1994, a.k.a. the Summer I Did Nothing. I snailed them a postal money order, and they snailed back a floppy disk. How strange to think, nowadays!)

Comments

[mangosteen]

I have been playing Freeverse Software's version of it.

Indeed, I've been playing Freeverse bridge for a while as well.

[...]which I am led to understand is (as Mr. Morse once told me) WRONG! WRONG!! WRONG!!!

No disrespect to Mr. Morse here, but you see, that's symptomatic of the reasons I'm disinclined to play bridge vs. real people. There are two main reasons, actually:

1) People who stomp on you because you opened your mouth during the bidding and now are all pissed off because you don't know the BlackwoodJacobyAndMeyersCrosbyStillsNashAndYoung convention, even though they know you're a novice.

2) People who claim seven tricks at the end of a hand and clear the cards away immediately, even though they know you're a novice.

There seems to be a higher level of "well everyone knows that" in bridge than in other games I've played. If I could find a group of people with whom I wouldn't have to worry about the two above scenarios, I'd likely play on a regular basis.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Indeed, card games are much harder than, say, chess to write an AI for--not just because of the human interaction element, but also because an open game is always going to be easier than a closed game. At every point in a game of chess (or reversi, etc.), both sides know the entire state of the game, exactly, which makes it easier to look forward (especially for a computer, which can brute-force it). But in bridge, there are unknowns and possibilities, which makes it harder to write an AI appropriately.

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

Hrm -- I've played Euchre and Sheepshead but never Bridge.

It's a shame they don't have a Freeverse Go -- I've finally got around to learning that game and I've only been able to find one 'player vs AI' version of it for the Mac. It was written way back in 1986 for the 512 Mac or Mac + ... I'm a little suprised it even runs in OS 9 ... it looks more like an experimental school project than a saleable product. I'm probably a 28-kyu player and even I've been able to beat it.

I'm told it's also difficult to write an AI for Go as well due to the size of the board as well as the very nature of the game itself. There's no really easily defined goal such as 'checkmate the king'.