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

Re: Go on Mac

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

My brother Steve said one of his friends, and his wife Anne, like:
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FINALIST IN THE 2003, 2004 World Computer Bridge Championships
2004 Winner of the World Computer Bridge Championships Round Robin

-- http://www.bridgebaron.com/home.html
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But, $.