A bridge hand generator programThe program dealer can be used to generate hands for partnerships bidding training or for generating statistics that can be used to design conventions, or win postmortems. The program reads the description from standard input, and writes results on standard output. In general the input specifies a condition and an action, the program will then generate a lot of hands, and if the condition is satisfied execute the action. The input file resemble a programming language, with functions specific to bridge play. A simple example:
as input will print 40 hands with north holding a balanced hand (4333 or 4432 shape) and at least 19 high card points. HistoryThe program was written by Hans van Staveren in the mid 1990’s and made available as-is on his ftp-site. After that, Hans stopped working on the code. In the late 1990’s, I picked up the code and added a bunch of features that I needed for my analysis work, such as a controls() operator and pbn output. More people started to contribute. At that time, I volunteered to act as the code coordinator for the program and between 1998 and 2000, new version were released at regular intervals. Development stopped again in the late 1990’s. At the moment, all I do, is collect bug reports and fixes. Once or twice a year, I will sit down with a pot of coffee and a laptop, and make a new tarfile. That is about all the time I have for this project at the moment. If anybody out there has more time to spend on this project, let me know. WarningDealer is meant as a training tool to generate specific hands. It is not meant to generate random hands for a tournament. If you want to do this, the original author Hans van Staveren has written totally different code. You can find it at www.xs4all.nl/~sater. If you use other programs now to deal hands for tournaments please read the documentation of Big Deal. You will be convinced and switch. Go to the softwareAs I wrote before, there are 2 versions of the program:
|