BBO and Robots
There is a new option to make players take over to play contracts bid by their robot partners.
Is this acceptable for EBU sanctioned tournaments?
My view is that it's invalid and not proper Bridge. When you play with a robot its NGS grading is based on its ability to remember all the cards and play accordingly.
Alan
Alan
Comments
We are not intending to use this facility for our EBU daily games but will not prohibit clubs from doing this and will keep an eye on how it works in practice. Remember, only just over two years ago there were those arguing that master points and NGS should not be given for online games, or for partnerships containing robots, but I think that these views have softened in the light of how it has worked in practice.
In any case such games are only going to be a very small part of the data that the EBU gets in every day - and only contracts where the robot is the presumed declarer are going to be affected - roughly 1/ 4 of the deals that any player playing with a robot plays.
No doubt some players won't like the change (not complying with law (definitions)!) whilst others would - "I play more hands".
Whilst a robot can remember all the cards played - it is easily bamboozled because it assumes everyone plays the same as it does. They also don't signal in defense so any partnership that does signal (and remembers to watch out for them!) has an inherent advantage.
The robots are much better declarers than the vast majority of club players (out of the three main parts of bridge – bidding, defending, declaring – the robots are definitely better at declaring than defending or bidding), so this setting would likely have quite an effect on the performance of robot/human partnerships (as the "best parts" of the robot's play would no longer be relevant). That might need to be accounted for in the NGS somehow.