http://www.ny-bridge.com/allevy/computerbridge/index.htm

Hint: Start programming bidding strategy by using simple ol’ Standard American… with Jacoby Transfers, Blackwood Convention, and old fashioned Stayman Convention. That outta be good enough for an American audience.

Yahoo! bridge is very, very social and quite friendly. Try the social lounge or beginner lounge. Always, always, always congratulate opponents or thank your partner for a job well done.

For those new to the game, bridgebase is a great way to learn how. Paul, you might want to download the training programs from http://www.acbl.org. A free program called EasyBridge has algorithms that speak clearly what they’re thinking and doing. You should be able to get a lot of ideas from that.

I can’t wait for the newer versions to come out so I can test Paul’s bridge playing logic.

Final thought, Paul: don’t forget to display a dialog box exclaiming “That’s good bridge!” when your team gets burned by a trick on a contract.

Ryan: Kulinibridge is the new Kulinibox?

fluffy: Maybe for the 9.x series. I’m partially hoping that implementing a bridge AI will help me learn at least basic strategy. Even with a relatively simple bidding system, there’s a fair bit of information you have to remember. A for-computers-only system could end up being bizarre-looking, but might wring as much information as possible out of the communications channel.

Eric: *crickets*

Jeff: Actually, if I asked to play euchre, I’d probably be asked, “uh, what’s that?” Not having grown up in Indiana and all. Though oddly enough, the only time I ever played euchre was in Missouri. Also, bridge turns out to be a more complex game than you’d think would be favored by old ladies. Unless maybe it’s just that none of them are any good. I don’t know; I’ve never played bridge with any.

I’ve heard from the person who introduced me to bridge a few weeks ago that the bridge areas on Yahoo Games have a surprising paucity of socially inept morons. I haven’t tried to see if that is indeed the case or not.

Unfortunately, when you mention to family members and friends that you want to play it instead of something like euchre, you immediately get the “uh, that’s for old ladies that read that snippet part of the newspaper — I didn’t want to be associated with it or I didn’t hang around old ladies long enough to learn this black art.” So I never really had a knowledgable group to learn from.

I think that if somehow you got access to an online bridge playing group that was group and then recorded their moves, you could use a simple Naive Bayes or Neural Network algorithm to get a pretty good result. I wonder if that corpus of data exists somewhere.

But if you get good and need a partner, I’ll be your dummy anytime.

/anybody? no?

Hello? Genetic algorithms?