[rustysnow]

Hi all, I have not posted anything on the forum yet so hopefully this post turns out to look just fine. If the post turns out to be awful eg board cant be seen, pls give me advice on how to improve or at least correct my mistakes thanks!

so, i recently played a 16-board IMP challenge with robots and this board appeared really interesting especially on how the robots played.

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I was sitting South and robots made several questionable bids as I have (hopefully) shown above. Apparently, West double 3C shows 13-21 HCP, 2+♣, 3+♦, 14-22 points, and hence am guessing East might have thought West to have just min opening strength, especially with my "takeout double" over 2NT which showed 11 HCP, when actually I just wanted partner to bid new suit. (Please feel free to give me any comments on my play, personally thinking maybe my double isn't really the best esp with unfavorable vul?) Contract ended up 3♥S-7 for a score of -700. I thought I was doomed initially, until when i saw the screen which showed at the other table it went 6NTE+1 for a score of -1470 for the NS pair, giving me a whopping 13 IMPs. On the other table, South did not intefere after 2nt, West bid 4♣ gerber, East bid 4♠ showing two aces, West jumped to 6NT.

I thought it was really interesting at my table, why the opps did not double my 3H bid. Also, I can slightly understand if the robots think I have 11 HCP with my takeout double (on the verge of disagreeing as I passed at the start), but are the robots that inflexible to think that I just dont want diamonds? And then because they thought i have 11 HCP and hence they couldnt try slam? I mean if that was how it turned out I can understand logically but I guess that's a flaw in the robot's logic.

Let me know your thoughts! Have a great day, Russell

[Stephen Tu]

The bots are generally terrible at figuring out what doubles should be takeout and which should be penalty. This is because they don't really have anything like human "common sense", and the meaning of double is highly context dependent on what the previous auction is. So it has this massive rules database, and it has to match the auction to some rules set to figure out what double should mean. Since the number of possible competitive auctions is ginormous, it's hard to construct a set of rules to cover 100%, or even say 75% sensibly. So auctions like yours, especially rare auctions (takeout doubling at 3 level as a passed hand after partner passed and opps have shown invitational values is a suicidal maneuver, should basically never happen), the doubles are often ill-defined and the bot can't double for penalty since it might cause partner to pull it.

But it has ill-defined doubles on a lot of more common auctions also. BBO progress on improving the bot in this area seems non-existent, unfortunately, too big a problem for their resources?