[helene_t]

Instead of writing random posts on BBF, it is much more compact just to post the seed for the random text generator, then others can reproduce the random text if they are interested.

Josh's idea reminds me of the two brothers who kept telling each others the same jokes again and again. So to economize, they decided to number the jokes. So instead of telling a whole lengthy joke, just give the jokes number:

Brother A: 45!
(Brother B laughed hysterically since joke 45 was really funny)
Brother B: 12!
(Brother A giggled since joke 12 was a little naughty)
Brother A: 233!
(Brother B rolled over from laughing, since he hadn't heard joke 233 before!)

[kfay]

helene_t, on Sep 8 2010, 11:15 AM, said:

Instead of writing random posts on BBF, it is much more compact just to post the seed for the random text generator, then others can reproduce the random text if they are interested.

Josh's idea reminds me of the two brothers who kept telling each others the same jokes again and again. So to economize, they decided to number the jokes. So instead of telling a whole lengthy joke, just give the jokes number:

Brother A: 45!
(Brother B laughed hysterically since joke 45 was really funny)
Brother B: 12!
(Brother A giggled since joke 12 was a little naughty)
Brother A: 233!
(Brother B rolled over from laughing, since he hadn't heard joke 233 before!)

This isn't how I remember the joke, I recall something like:

A man is sentenced to life in prison. On his first night he hears his fellow inmates calling out numbers into the darkness, eliciting laughter from those who were still awake.

Finally, after someone yelled out, "Number 17!!" to which his cellmate laughed, remarking, "yeah, yeah, that's a good one!" he asked what was going on.

"Well, when you're in the joint for so long eventually you've heard them all, so we just decided to assign numbers to all the jokes we know."

The man decided to give it a go so after some silence he called out, "Number 54!!" but no one laughed.

"What did I do wrong?" he asked.

"Brother," his cellmate responded, "some people just don't know how to tell a joke."

[peachy]

I prefer the way hands are currently presented. No suit symbols, in order of SHDC, and all spots showing if they are known, with lower case x's for spots that are not known. Particularly for defensive problems, and sometimes for bidding as well, the actual spot cards should be included because they often matter.

I am starting to get a feeling I've been had, for answering this post...

[ArtK78]

peachy, on Sep 8 2010, 11:39 AM, said:

I prefer the way hands are currently presented. No suit symbols, in order of SHDC, and all spots showing if they are known, with lower case x's for spots that are not known. Particularly for defensive problems, and sometimes for bidding as well, the actual spot cards should be included because they often matter.

I am starting to get a feeling I've been had, for answering this post...

I have the same feeling for just reading it!

[Siegmund]

I have occasionally written AK-6 AJ-3 etc. in the past (and much prefer "6" to "4" for AKxxxx.)

Still, there doesn't seem to be any real gain, long as we count the x's right. And PLEASE use T for tens. I don't know how many times I've thought somebody had a seven-card suit, A-K-one-zero-x-x-x, because I saw 7 characters on the screen.

[JLOGIC]

math nerds itt

[gwnn]

Are there other types of nerds? Or more strictly, are there nerds who are arbitrarily bad in mathematics?

[helene_t]

peachy, on Sep 8 2010, 05:39 PM, said:

I am starting to get a feeling I've been had, for answering this post...

Can some moderator please move Peachy's post to the official water cooler hijacked thread?

[TimG]

gnasher, on Sep 8 2010, 08:43 AM, said:

TimG, on Sep 8 2010, 02:22 PM, said:

How about:

AK6
AJ3
A2
QJ2

That would wastefully use an extra character whenever you have a 10-card suit.

Not if you use T for 10.

[helene_t]

So AT is just that while A-T is AT98765432?

[kfay]

TimG, on Sep 8 2010, 01:48 PM, said:

gnasher, on Sep 8 2010, 08:43 AM, said:

TimG, on Sep 8 2010, 02:22 PM, said:

How about:

AK6
AJ3
A2
QJ2

That would wastefully use an extra character whenever you have a 10-card suit.

Not if you use T for 10.

t's are basically sideways x's, imo.

no place for hem in his hread.

[TimG]

helene_t, on Sep 8 2010, 02:06 PM, said:

So AT is just that while A-T is AT98765432?

In Han's proposal AT is written AT0, in mine it would be AT2.

[mgoetze]

gnasher, on Sep 8 2010, 02:16 PM, said:

gwnn, on Sep 8 2010, 01:13 PM, said:

At least we should stop using the enter button so much (it is 2 bytes).

Only on Windows. Maybe BBO would consider switching to a Unix server, so that if anyone does wastefully use a newline the damage will be reduced by 50%?

The forums seem to be running on a linux server already.

Using a - to separate the length/no. of spots is obviously wasteful. For compactness, I propose using it for sequences instead, i.e. AKQJ2 can obviously be written more compactly as A-J2. Even better would be to assign new letters to certain honor combinations, e.g. replace any KQ with M (this combination is called "Marriage" in German) and you can write it just as well as AMJ2. Or even H2 (H for honors). I'm sure you can think of more, e.g. F ("Finesse") for AQ, etc.

[ahydra]

Free, on Sep 8 2010, 06:56 AM, said:

You only need 96 bits to write an entire deal, 2 extra for vulnerability and 2 extra for dealer. That's 12.5 bytes, so you still have 4 bits left (since we only use bytes anyway) to select which hands you want of that deal. Why waste so many bytes on writing a single hand? 13 bytes is enough to show full deals, 1 hand, any 2 hands, or even any 3 hands.

How does one write a deal in 96 bits? Surely you need 102 - I assume you're doing the sensible thing which is to specify, using 2 bits per card (giving the cards a predefined order), the hand in which the card appears. After the 51st card we know where the 52nd one belongs by process of elimination. But if we come down to 50 cards and two hands with 12 we can't place the remaining two - or in your case we have 48 cards but (unless the current distribution is 13 13 13 9) no idea which hand the remaining cards belong in.

We may rarely get some minor compression opportunities when one hand holds all the small clubs or whatever the last cards are

As for the OP - it might be better to specify the number of cards as people are used to reading/saying holdings like "ace-king fifth", etc. So AK5 should mean AKxxx, and zeroes can (of course) be omitted.

But you might confuse AK5 with the actual holding of the ace, king and five, I suppose - so what about AK-5. And then you notice that it's only worth doing that if you hold enough spotcards anyway, so you wouldn't write AK-3, but AKx. AK-4 or AKxx both use the same number of characters so it's a matter of choice, which is always nice to have (except when writing parsers for files/strings )

ahydra

[inquiry]

Chthonic just emailed me, he says you guys are all wrong.

He would show this spade suit (AK952) like this...

1100010001001

A void would be

0000000000000

He says if humans have trouble reading 1100010001001 it is 1001db49269 in hexadecimal. He finally make a huge concession to me because of my stupidity, and told me that this could be written as 6281.

He said he stores all the information about hands in binary form and can't figure out why we donot. !3 bit math is childs play, he says. But he says we humans can dummy it down to 4 bit math

• 0000 is no honor this is the SAME AS 0 in decimal he said.
  
• 0001 is the JACK, he said this is 1 in decimal, and as a memory tool (he thinks we need many), jacks are usually worth 1 point
  
• 0010 is the Queen, he said this is 2 in decimal, and asked me if I knew how many points the queen usually counts, I could swear I heard him laughing
  
• 0011 is three, and shows the Q and the Jack. This happens to be three in decimal.2+1, 2+! he kept saying as if that made any sense to me
  
• 0100 is the King. This is Four in declmal, and in Zar points, the king is worth "four points" he explained. Does that help you he asked?
  
• 0101 is King plus Jack, and cool thing, this is 5, just as in Zar points!
  
• 0110 is King plus queen, which works out to 6 to be six in decimal, and six in ZAR points.
  
• 0111 is all the royal family: KQJ, and is 7 in decimal, as it is in ZAR points
  
• 1000 is the ACE, this is 8 in decimal and is where Zar goes wrong.
  
• 1001 is AJ, and 9 in decimal
  
• 1010 is AQ, and is 10 in decimal
  
• 1011 is AQJ and is 11 in decimal
  
• 1100 is AK and is 12 in decimal
  
• 1101 is AKJ and is 13 in decimal
  
• 1110 is AKQ and is 14 in decimal
  
• 1111 is AKQJ and is 15 in decimal

If we are willing to accept a second number for total number of non-honors, you get something like:

15-3 to show AKQJxxx

But he says, if you stick to binary, then wne a card is played, the math is easy, imagine you held 1111 and then you played teh King, what would you have left? Why 1011 of course. Why we humans insist on decimal math is one of many things he can't understand.

[blahonga]

ahydra, on Sep 8 2010, 11:48 PM, said:

How does one write a deal in 96 bits?

There are only 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000 different bridge deals. Log2 of 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000 is about 95.5. Just assign a number to each bridge deal and take the binary expansion of this number.

[babalu1997]

gwnn, on Sep 8 2010, 01:13 PM, said:

Are there other types of nerds? Or more strictly, are there nerds who are arbitrarily bad in mathematics?

david byrne?

[Cascade]

hanp, on Sep 8 2010, 11:07 PM, said:

We'll write A23 for A8652.

There is an obvious ambiguity here between

Axxx2 and Axxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Do you propose a method to resolve this?

Otherwise I like the idea.

[655321]

Better would be to have one hex number for AKQJ - i.e. each suit either has the Ace or not, has the King or not, etc. So AKQJ would be represented as 'f', and none of the AKQJ would be represented as 0.

So, AKQTxxx Kxx - Qxx could be represented as

eT3
42
00
22

or as

e4
42
00
22

depending on whether or not you were interested in tens.

[dburn]

One could, of course, commandeer the letters from "g" to (or, as they say in Barbarian, through) "v" as extensions to the hexadecimal notation and use base 32 instead. That way, s4 is AKQxxxx and t3 is AKQ10xxx.

A fifth theory is held by idiots, but it is doubtful if they know any more about the matter than the others. (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary)