[eamongall]

Folks

I have used GIB since Matt Ginsberg first showed up around 1996 with GIB.
After some time GIBSON arrived but required so much computing power that it could only
kick in about trick 3 at the time circa 1998.
So we had olt client GIBs and one could notice the delay as GIBSON kicked in
Basically at trick 3 GIB went for a little think and as long as it had not blown the hand
on Tricks 1 or 2 ..one could expect a decent play from trick 3 onwards

One could see the change over on the DOS screen as the readout showed a different type of
calculation

With the advent of the web based BBO we had the GIB robots working at "Lightning" speed.
If you ran a GIB table on the web and used old client yourself as an invitee ....the hand was long
finished on the web version by the time old client got to trick 13 (if GIB was declarer)

Weird

OK but I was not going to use these Web bots as it did not "feel" like the GIB I knew

Gradually loads of my acquaintances moved to Web BBO.

I compared the web robots skills to my local clubs weakest game and found the local club weakies competed a level
closer to PAR then these web robots

A friend of mine started using the "STRONG" robots and swore by them ...
Well of course ..they had better database and holes plugged but she was comparing them to
the weak original robots

None of the web robots give me a warm rosy feeling of the computer cranking thru the gears
like my off line GIB does
I don't see the "pause for thought " at trick 3 anymore

Now maybe the whole robot playing engine has been rewritten or else it is crippled in some way.
I know all GIBS on BBO have been crippled in some way since the beginning when compared to the commercial version.

However I will always wonder if GIBSON is still there

GIBSON who paused for thought at trick 3

Now don't get me wrong ...the GIB robots are a good challenge but one
needs to sit EAST WEST to get tougher comparison as the humans most often sit SOUTH by habit

I also used GIB extensively via Stephen Picketts GIBbrowser program

Any thoughts ??

Some one told me the GIB robots use Cloud processing power but I am too old to understand that process

To me Ginsberg told me I would need a 20GHZ PC back in 2001 or so

Now we have Quad Cores but I am not sure GIB works on all cores ... I think I spotted my commercial GIB
running on 3 cores once

Thanks
Eamon Galligan
eamongall on BBO

[Stephen Tu]

According to previous statements from BBO in this forum, the basic bots have been lobotomized, no GibSon. Supposedly advanced bots, for tourneys and the $1/day, still have GibSon active. Although perhaps not given long think times so may not do as well as home GIB given slow playing settings.

I wish that BBO would regularly release their bidding database updates for people who have commercial GIBs. They did like one release many years ago containing improvements they had made since Ginsberg sold it to them. But none since.

If you have example hands where advanced GIB butchered the play, maybe you can try them out on your home GIB and see if it does better. And maybe post it here?

[Stefan_O]

How does Gibson (single-dummy solver) actually work?

Is there anywhere a readable description of the algorithm?

[Stephen Tu]

http://www.jair.org/...0-1957-jair.pdf is Ginsberg's academic paper on the work.

"Readable" will depend on eye of beholder.