GIB has received a great deal of press as a result of its participation in the Par Contest at the 1998 World Bridge Championships, which were held in Lille, France. In an invitational field consisting of 34 of the world's best card players and GIB, GIB finished 12th. Hands in which GIB has outplayed world-class human players are also the subject of a series of articles in the Dutch bridge magazine IMP.
GIB has successfully solved 64% of the deals in Fred Gitelman's Bridge Master product. Bridge Baron, one of GIB's most popular competitors, solved only 18% of the deals, providing still further evidence that GIB's card play is at a level far superior to that of any other program. Finally, William Forrester reports similar results when testing GIB on the hands in Blackwood's 1978 Play of the Hand with Blackwood.
GIB's bidding is based on the data file that is distributed with Meadowlark Bridge. Unlike Meadowlark, however, GIB augments the basic bidding rules with a Borel simulation in order to provide judgement to the system.
GIB is written in C and is based on an extremely fast double dummy solver. The principal technique used to construct the double dummy solver is Ginsberg's partition search, which is described in a technical paper of the same name that was presented at AAAI-96. The single dummy bridge player is built using techniques that were described in an article appearing in the June, 1996 issue of the Bridge World.
GIB is available as a product, and we have also released a large library of double-dummy results. This library is available in both binary and compressed ASCII.
Matthew L. Ginsberg (ginsberg /at/ cirl.uoregon.edu)