Last month Bridge Base Online (BBO) announced that it was limiting players to 6 hands a day (unless they subscribed). End of an era … I remember logging onto BBO (and perhaps one or two other online bridge sites) back in ’93, and I still have a semi-regular team practice match weekly. I did actually pay to play a few games during Covid, but I do not particularly care to play online tournaments, or online against random people. I understand that BBO needs to make money, but it seems to me that they’ve made a windfall during- and post-Covid, often at the expense of physical clubs, and this seems like a short-sighted money grab.

Anyway, we decided to move to IntoBridge and it seems quite reasonable. One nice feature is a Daily Challenge (similar to BBOs weekly free robot tournament). Play five hands with robots in the other three seats, and see how you did against a celebrity (who played the hands with robots and recorded a video on youtube). I don’t often watch the videos, but it’s amusing. The Robots generally bid much better than BBOs, as well.

Anyway, FYI.

I was reading The Zvi’s discussion of the METR report on Hugging Face when another gamer sent me the 3quarks daily article where an AI summarizes the same report. For this discussion, the only thing you need to know is that there were many agents of a few two different “breeds,”¹ who started up a message board and communicated to (jointly) work towards a common goal.

Which reminded me of my bridge game yesterday (and earlier this week).

Bridge partners are jointly working together to get the best score possible² and there are a variety of “breeds” (in terms of levels of understanding). Each agent/player has different information, but the partnership shares the same goals …

Even though most of the AI agents were the same breed (HIPM), they did not all necessarily agree on the best course of action. Partially that’s because they each had their own subtask goal, but they’d all learned new/different information in the process of working towards it, which affected them.

And there is limited bandwidth.

Like bridge players. Same goal, but tacit (shared training) information, different real world information, and limited bandwidth.

Which come up in two games this week, with two partners.

My partner yesterday is an expert (better than me, but not ridiculously better). But she has a few unusual preferences in convention card and bidding (which affects us)³ but I trust her baseline and can (mostly) mentally figure out the differences myself. For example, in one of our earliest games together we had the following auction:

1H-1NT*; (*Semi-forcing 1NT — Opener is only allowed to pass with a 5332 hand with a minimum or subminimum)

2C-2S*; (*Undiscussed)

I made the 2 Spades bid in complete confidence that my partner would recognize it as an Impossible 2 Spades. (I had already denied spades, since I had bypassed 1 Spade in favor of 1 NoTrump). This is not merely because she’s an expert … there are several players of my calibre that might be flummoxed by this bid … because they learned bidding by rote and the person who taught them never mentioned it. ⁴

And in fact she did recognize it, although not as confidently as I’d hoped. (“We’d never discussed that auction…. so I hoped you knew what it should mean.”)

(It should mean — “I have the one of the best possible hands in support of your newly bid minor.”)⁵

With that as the background, before the game I brought up an issue I wanted to clarify. “I seem to recall that you mentioned Equal Level Conversion in our last game. Do we play it?” “Yes.”

Now armed with the knowledge that my partner plays ELC, a few hands later we get the following auction:

(1H)-Double-(P)-3 Clubs;(P)-3 Diamonds

Is 3 Diamonds an Equal Level Conversion? Yes. But should the ELC convention apply at the 3 level, after a jump? I’m sure that partnerships who have discussed everything (and I’ve been in one or two of those) might have an answer (you can never discuss everything).

It may be that there’s a theoretical discussion that answers it, but all the discussions I’ve read of ELC (including the one I linked before) are silent on the issue.

(And since I play Raptor⁶ in many partnerships, I’ve never had to explore ELC in depth, because Raptor covers all the hands that would want to use ELC).

So my partnership was in the same place as the AI agents. We had similar background and goals, we’d made an agreement, but a very shorthanded one “We play ELC (No Further Discussion/Definition).”

Were we trained on the same data? After a brief internal argument as to whether it should be ELC (or forcing) which left me undecided. I fell back onto the “Assuming I am wrong, which mistake would be less devastating?” … at matchpoints either one could be a zero, so I fell back again onto “The ELC hands are weaker and (therefore) it is more probable that she has that hand” and treated it as ELC and passed.

Wrong.

Partner (being a well-aligned agent) admitted after the hand that she’d made the bid before realizing it might fall into a gray area⁷. (And ethical enough to not give any hint of a signal when I was thinking).

Earlier this week my college partner (whom I’ve played with for almost four decades, but most of his partnerships are in the DC area) had a technical argument about what a bid should mean. I’d never heard of his interpretation, it is one of those “East Coast vs West Coast⁸” things.

I gave yesterday’s partner the auction (without naming either of our interpretations of what it should mean) and she said “(West Coast Meaning/The One Tao Thought), what else could it possibly be?” So with one partner

I have no grand point.

I just thought it was interesting that AI agents sometimes suffered the same indignities as Bridge Players.

1. Mostly an unknown agent labelled “HIPM,” but a few GPT-Sol 5.6 ︎
2. See S.J. Simon’s “Why you lose at Bridge” for a discussion of “Best Score Possible” vs “Best Possible Score” and the realities that make the two different … he calls this the “Half a loaf” theory. ︎
3. Just as an example, she prefers to open 5Spade+5Club hands with 1 Club, which I know Danny Kleinman recommends but I’ve never seen anyone else play it, as expert standard has gone to MAFIA. “Majors Are First In All (instances)” ︎
4. I have been burned several times by assuming that all bridge players have read as many theory books as I have, and while I don’t think I’ve ever had a partner miss this, they’ve missed other things I consider equally obscure. ︎
5. With a few rare exceptions, such as a splinter. So it is stronger than a direct raise to 3 of a minor. ︎
6. Man, I wrote that a decade ago? ︎
7. Of course, I might never know if she meant that or was just being polite. ︎
8. We played together in Baltimore … and there is a system/dialect called “Washington Standard.” It mostly know where it does not agree with local standard, which is more West Coast. ︎