[anderswen]

Hello

I am playing bridge at a facebook site sometimes aswell. There they have setted up tournaments, but one have to sit out now and then, although they only have four boards.
At the BBO automated express tournaments with 6 boards, how are the people / tournament set up so no one have to sit out? Round robin, Howell... I do not know much about this so all info is appriciated.
Also the automation:

How is the program able to calculate the result of the contract, even though the hand is not finished in time?

How is the algorithm of the robot set up? Is it very complicated or can I study it somewhere?

Thanks

Anders Wennerblom

[barmar]

We call our single-winner movement "Howell", but it's not the real Howell movement. I'm not sure it has a name.

We avoid sitouts by using robots to fill in the extra seats.

If a hand isn't finished in time, we have 4 robots play out the rest of the tricks to determine the result.

The robot we use is GIB. Matt Ginsberg, the original programmer, published some articles on his design 10-15 years ago. He mostly wrote about the bidding, not the play. The software is proprietary now, so you can't study it.