NAME¶
dealer - bridge hand generator
SYNOPSIS¶
dealer [-023ehuvmqV] [-p
n] [-g
n] [-s
seed] [-l
n] [
inputfile]
DESCRIPTION AND EXAMPLE¶
The program dealer can be used to generate hands for partnerships bidding
training or for generating statistics that can be used to design conventions,
or win postmortems.
Running the program involves 3 steps. First, the user has to write an input file
containing hand-descriptions and action. A very simple example would look
something like:
condition shape(north, any 4333 + any 4423) and hcp(north)>=19
action printall
The first line specifies a condition for the north hand, in this case, a hand
with 4333 or 4432 shape and at least 19 high card points. The second line
tells the program to print the 4 hands. The program reads from standard input,
so in principle, it is possible to enter the conditions directly into the
program. Using a file is a lot more practical though, as it allows the user to
re-use conditions and fine-tune the conditions.
Then the program has to be run, it reads the file, looks at the various command
line switches and then produces a number of hands. The output appears on the
screen but can be re-directed to a file.
Finally, the user has to look at output and analyze the produced hands.
Alternatively, the output can be used for a playing program.
OPTIONS¶
- -e
- Exhaust mode (alpha version).
- -g number
- Maximum number of hands to generate (default is 1000000).
- -l number
- Instead of shuffling, deals are read from the file library.dat by M.
Ginsberg (see [1]). When using this, the tricks() function is quite
fast and bridge.exe from GIB is not used.
[1] ftp://ftp.cirl.uoregon.edu/pub/users/ginsberg/bridge/
- -m
- Shows a progress meter.
- -p number
- Maximum number of hands to produce (default is 40).
- -q
- Suppress PBN output (useful for testing, then switch it back on when
generating the "final" sample).
- -s number
- Uses number as the seed for the random generator, running the program
twice with the same seed will produce the same sequence of hands.
- -u
- Select uppercase for the symbols "AKQJT" (default is
lowercase).
- -v
- Toggle verbose output, prints statistics at the end of the run (default is
on).
- -V
- Emit a version-identification string and exit.
- -h
- Help, prints the syntax.
- -0
- No swapping, each deal is generated normally (shuffling) (default).
- -2
- 2-way swapping, after each shuffle another deal is generated by permuting
E and W, leaving N and S in place (NB: not fully compatible with
predeal).
- -3
- 3-way swapping, after each shuffle another 5 deals are generated by
permuting E, W, and S every which way, leaving N in place (NB: not fully
compatible with predeal).
BUGS¶
I would prefer if you did
not use this program for generating hands for
tournaments. I have not investigated the random number generation closely
enough for me to be comfortable with that thought.
SEE ALSO¶
/usr/share/doc/dealer/Manual,
dealer.dpp(6),
deal(6).
AUTHORS¶
- Hans van Staveren <sater@sater.home.cs.vu.nl>
- Henk Uijterwaal <henk@ripe.net>
- Manpage: Christoph Berg <cb@df7cb.de>
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE¶
This program is hereby put in the public domain. Do with it whatever you want,
but I would like you not to redistribute it in modified form without
mentioning the fact of modification. I will accept bug reports and
modification requests, without any obligation of course, but fixing bugs
someone else put in is beyond me.