[svengolly]

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Two passes followed by normal 1♣ opener. GIB W overcalls 1♥ on a 4-card suit (yes the bid explanation shows 5+ cards)!! Robot pard bids 1♠ and I pass facing a potential misfit and an otherwise mediocre hand. ROBOT doubles down and bids 2♥!! Now I'm very puzzled and even though I can't see all 4 hands, I can smell something's not kosher in the BBO deli.

End result was GIB E/W going down 4 for a cold top for the human side. If this is bidding by simulation, it's time to yank that code out from its roots.

[smerriman]

Don't see anything wrong with the 1♥ bid. But if you're going to play with GIB, and decide to pass a forcing bid, you're going to get unexpected results; it has no way at all of predicting what you'll do in the future (for reference, it thinks it's guaranteed you won't pass out 2♥).

Can't see much value in programming it to better handle situations where humans make impossible bids though; you take the wins with the losses.

If your point is that 1♠ shouldn't be forcing, I guess that's another matter, but it is to GIB.

[svengolly]

smerriman, on 2023-July-24, 21:07, said:

Don't see anything wrong with the 1♥ bid. But if you're going to play with GIB, and decide to pass a forcing bid, you're going to get unexpected results; it has no way at all of predicting what you'll do in the future (for reference, it thinks it's guaranteed you won't pass out 2♥).

Can't see much value in programming it to better handle situations where humans make impossible bids though; you take the wins with the losses.

If your point is that 1♠ shouldn't be forcing, I guess that's another matter, but it is to GIB.

GIB is a passed hand so how can 1♠ possibly be forcing? The bid explanation didn't say forcing. IMHO, the guaranteed forcing bids are X and 2♥. If the bidding had gone 1♣* (1♥) 1♠, then yes, 1♠ is forcing (*as dealer) AND the bid hint will say so (pretty sure about that). Also, we know the human player always ends up with the strongest hand.

I think the real issue for me is that too many times I hear "that's just the robots" like it's the excuse for poor programming or unexpected responses by those rascally humans. If the ACBL didn't hand out masterpoints for robot games, I could understand that line of thinking. BUT, shouldn't the goal be to make GIB better? Sadly, my experience playing a fair number of robot games leads me to believe BBO ain't doing much to improve the bidding side.

On average, GIB plays better than the majority of human players as declarer, inconsistent on defense.

[smerriman]

svengolly, on 2023-July-25, 00:26, said:

The bid explanation didn't say forcing.

Uh, it very clearly does.

svengolly said:

BUT, shouldn't the goal be to make GIB better? Sadly, my experience playing a fair number of robot games leads me to believe BBO ain't doing much to improve the bidding side.

BBO don't work on GIB and haven't for years. This forum is only to muse on how it works and laugh at its mistakes.

[pescetom]

smerriman, on 2023-July-25, 01:30, said:

BBO don't work on GIB and haven't for years. This forum is only to muse on how it works and laugh at its mistakes.

And ruefully count the (real) dollars we paid to play with it in the vain hope that something better must follow.

[steve2005]

2♥ is incredibly bad though. It's worse than raising your own pre-empt!!

[johnu]

pescetom, on 2023-July-25, 15:02, said:

And ruefully count the (real) dollars we paid to play with it in the vain hope that something better must follow.

Only some pay, I think most just play for free, and get what they pay for. I agree that paying customers should get constantly improving/fixed bots to play with.

[smerriman]

steve2005, on 2023-July-25, 16:56, said:

2♥ is incredibly bad though. It's worse than raising your own pre-empt!!

No disagreement there. But it's working under the proviso it forces South to bid, in which case 2♥ is a good bid. That proviso is of course silly, but when 0=1 when South passes the first forcing bid, you can deduce anything vacuously.

[thepossum]

I am curious though. Surely that 1 spade bid can legitimately be passed

I think bidding the 4-card hearts twice is questionable though

How much revenue do Bridgebase rake in for R and D - they have to service 10s of thousands of free games every day

[svengolly]

smerriman, on 2023-July-25, 01:30, said:

Uh, it very clearly does.

Hmmmm. I really don't recall it saying forcing when the bid was made but clicking on the bid in hand editor shows it. Any chance some of that info gets cut off? I have my text set fairly large since I'm hella farsighted. Even if it was forcing, there are lots of tactical reasons to do other than the expected "book bid". Hey if GIB can pass my TAKEOUT double due to a simulation, I can pass a 1S bid due to my personal calculus.

The sad part about the programming is the ACBL enables crap like this by NOT pushing BBO to improve things. I get masterpoints almost every time I play a robot tourney I'm sure partially because I know some of the eccentricities of the GIB bidding and play system

[smerriman]

svengolly, on 2023-July-25, 18:44, said:

Hmmmm. I really don't recall it saying forcing when the bid was made but clicking on the bid in hand editor shows it. Any chance some of that info gets cut off? I have my text set fairly large since I'm hella farsighted. Even if it was forcing, there are lots of tactical reasons to do other than the expected "book bid". Hey if GIB can pass my TAKEOUT double due to a simulation, I can pass a 1S bid due to my personal calculus.

Not that I'm aware of, but I guess if the font is really large and off the edge of the screen, it would have to be cut off in some way.

And yeah, it's perfectly fine for a human to go off-book and pass 1♠ - just that you're then not playing the robot's system, so any time 1♠ is not passed out, you'll be in very dangerous waters with the rest of the bidding sequence - may get a very good score, may get a very bad score, and it's going to be pretty random which of those two it is.

If BBO ever did start working on GIB again after nearly 5 years of dead silence (i.e., if 0=1 again), I suspect changing how GIB handles humans going off-book would be at the very bottom of the heap compared to everything else that's broken. Then again, following my own logic, if 0=1, I guess anything's possible..