[ahydra]

blahonga, on Sep 8 2010, 05:45 PM, said:

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.

Ouch :/ Would love to see pseudocode for encoding/decoding those!

ahydra

[Free]

ahydra, on Sep 9 2010, 06:54 AM, said:

blahonga, on Sep 8 2010, 05:45 PM, said:

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.

Ouch :/ Would love to see pseudocode for encoding/decoding those!

ahydra

Read this: http://bridge.thomas...com/impossible/

This is how you can easily create a deal generator. You just need a 96-bits randomizer (PRNG or TRNG) and you can generate every single deal...

[ahydra]

That's pretty awesome, I have to admit. Although for 1 extra byte we can just specify the hand each card appears in and save a bunch of maths, it somewhat takes the fun out of it.

ahydra

[1eyedjack]

It is an entertaining thread, but it seems to me that the purpose of the proposal is to save time for, and add convenience to, the person writing the hand at the expense of that of the person reading and decyphering it, where the more admirable objective should be to minimise the mental effort decyphering the hand even if that should be at the expense of a small extra time and effort in writing it.

Take this example:
http://forums.bridgebase.com/index.php?sho...ndpost&p=493739
It takes extra effort to determine whether
AQJ94 is
(1) a 5 card suit containing the Ace, Queen, Jack, nine and four, with the four for whatever reason being considered a significant card,
contrasted with
(2) AQJ9xxxx

Now I appreciate that option (1) above (the 5 card suit, all cards being significant) would be written as AQJ940, which on this occasion (albeit admittedly perhaps not generally) takes an extra character to describe the suit. And maybe if the notation became standard and "second nature" then the decyphering overhead would diminish.

For as long as more than one notation is popular, it needs to be apparent which notation is being used on a given occasion. Explicitly expressing the notation would be tedious. Provided that you are giving the entire hand, it may be obvious from the context, with the hand described being consistent only with one notation in order to have 13 cards (although this does not allow for errors in presenting hands with other than 13 cards - a practice which is rife). But expressing a single suit as AQJ94 is ambiguous as to the notation adopted.

I suppose that AQJ9(4) has some merit as it minimises mental decoding effort and saving you the trouble of having to count the "x"s, which is of value both to the poster and to the reader. It may also reduce the instances of typos where extra "x"s are typed (or missed) resulting in a hand posted with other than 13 cards.

[hanp]

Well, my keyboard is functioning properly again so I'm going to abandon the x-factor notation. Thanks all for the suggestions.

TimG, I regret you didn't appreciate the beauty of AK100.