Challenges of Playing Bridge Well

1
Challenges of Playing Bridge Well

• http//www.ny-bridge.com/allevy/Montreal/indexMent
  on.html
• Bridge requires a lot of real-time decision
  making in uncertain environments.
• The distribution of the opponents and partners
  cards is initially unknown and follows the laws
  of probability. However, as bids are made and
  cards are played these initial probabilities
  change ? quite difficult to automate (?belief
  networks).
• Defenders have to collaborate and employ complex
  signals for this purpose.
• There is a huge amount of domain specific
  knowledge on how to bid and how to play the hand
  ? difficult to computerize
• Declarer play requires planning!
• Determining the best plan to play a hand is very
  difficult determining the best linr of play with
  all hands visible is easy ? Deep Finesse
  http//www.deepfinesse.com/ does the job.
• Players false card or do others things to mislead
  the declarer (and frequently also partner).

2
Thoughts Concerning the KingRook_vs_Rook Problem

• The task is to solve the problem at hand
• Hill-Climbing, Randomized Hill Climbing,
  Backtracking, Best-first Search, all seem to be
  suitable search strategies for the problem
• Find good evaluation functions (e.g.
  f(pos)king_close_w_king(pos)a
  king_close_to_rook(pos)b c1/Freedom_black_king
  (pos)) for one of the available search strategies
• Rapid prototyping is strongly recommended also
  dont make things too complicated at the
  beginning
• Try to learn from sample runs
• Idea break the problem into sub-problems and
  solve each sub-problem separately.
• Idea Reduce the search space by disallowing
  certain moves
• Idea Use look-ahead when you use backtracking or
  hill climbing
• You are allowed to take advantage of the face
  that you know in advance how the black king
  moves. It is okay if you implement a game-style
  system but you should be aware of the fact that
  you are trying to solve a more complicated
  problem which makes it much harder to get your
  system running.
• Complex search strategies are frequently hard
  to debug/improve.

3
Thoughts Concerning the KingRook_vs_Rook
Problem (cont.)

• Instead of looking to all possible positions
  sample some of those to reduce the complexity of
  the search
• Checking for duplicate states might or might not
  help (this answer is dependent on the employed
  search strategy)
• Disjunctive goals in search create problems
• Taking advantage of symmetry is complicated, but
  might help!
• You will receive a file consisting of 10 training
  cases no later than September 19, 2001. There
  will be a demo where your program will be run for
  10 test cases that are somewhat similar to the
  ten training test cases.
• Test cases will be sorted by difficulty if you
  program cannot solve all the test problems this
  is not the end of the world however, if it is
  not able to solve the simple cases you will not
  get a good grade for project.
• The primary goal is to checkmate the black king
  however, programs that find shorter solutions
  will get higher scores.
• The project will be graded evaluating your
  report, the quality of the designed program, and
  the programs performance for the training and
  test set. Program performance for test case will
  count at least 55 for the overall grade.