[Free]

I have a suggestion, but I don't know if it's easily done. I'd change the way auctions are done: each player can only see his bid until it's his turn to bid again; then he gets the 3 other bids done by opps and p. This way players won't know who is thinking when it takes a while...

For spectators the biddings should all be shown ofcourse

What do you think?

[spwdo]

Free, on Jun 17 2004, 09:35 PM, said:

I have a suggestion, but I don't know if it's easily done. I'd change the way auctions are done: each player can only see his bid until it's his turn to bid again; then he gets the 3 other bids done by opps and p. This way players won't know who is thinking when it takes a while...

For spectators the biddings should all be shown ofcourse

What do you think?

Hi,

Well at first not bad suggestion at all but Tds gonna have a lot of xtras calls till players realise how software is working on this, so if /when suggest that first mutiple tds calls woud be disabled from tables so ppl sitting on the "call director" button woud end up with cramp but only one call woud reach td

[hrothgar]

I'm going to make a radical leap and assume that you are primarily interested in reducing UI during the auction.

The method that you suggest suffers from a significant problem: I won't be able to see either LHO's or partner's bid until I recieve RHO's bid. In turn, this means that I have much less information available to plan my auction and will have to spend MUCH more time considering what to bid. I believe that this type of feature would probably create more problems than it is designed to solve. In particular, please note that its easy to look at an auction and "understand" which player is under pressure and was likely to have introduced a delay.

In short, your suggestion will simply increase the total number of "unusual" delays, but do relatively little to reducing the transmission of UI.

From my perspective, I don't think that its worth the engineering time required to address the problem of UI. However, I did spend a bit of time trying to determine how this "should" be done. Some day, if the Bermuda Bowl or some other major event occurs using a computerized playing environment, it MIGHT make sense to implement something similar to the following. [Even here, I wouldn't bother]

Conceptually, what we want to be able to do is to add an optimal amount of "noise" to the signal in order to degrade the ability of players to draw accurate inference from the data. This is a pretty complex problem (one which cryptographers have worked on for a long time). The BIG problem is the following: the cases where bidding delays will convey the most information are on the far right tail of the the distribution. In order to degrade this signal, we need to introduce a LOT of noise. On average, auctions will take much longer.

[1eyedjack]

Added problem:

Suppose you want to know what is meant by an opponent's bid.

I can conceive of a situation where you may want, by private message, clarification from an opponent of the meaning of a call made by his partner. And you may want that explanation before it is the turn to bid of the person to whom you address the question. It would probably help matters if, at that time, he has access to the auction up to that point.

I suspect that the "hesitator" will normally be obvious, as the players who are all waiting for their next call will be sending public messages to the table along the lines of

"zzzzzz"

The one player who is not snoring is then the one who is thinking.

Then, say you misclick and seek an undo. Possible problems deciding whether to grant the undo, in the absence of any indication of what has happened at the table.

[Free]

Ok, so hiding the 3 bids will give a lot of problems because time is short. What about hiding bids until partner has bid? This would avoid UI from LHO and p, RHO can still think a while, but it's hidden for our p and our LHO. It would be like playing with screens, and everybody has the screen on his left side...

About alerts, it would be solved a lot with this method, because partner can already ask information (which isn't shown to us yet), and from the moment we can see the bid we also see the alerted info.

Better? Or still too many problems?

[1eyedjack]

Just one more point, but don't forget that a hesitation is AI in the hands of the opponents. Your suggestion seems to be denying them AI on which a skilful player might capitalise.