The NukkAI Challenge       

                                    Programs vs Nook                                                                                         

The NukkAI Challenge did not address a competition between the state of the art Computer Bridge software and Nook. The Owner of this Site has taken on the task to make such competition, although limited to the following  programs:  WBridge 5.12, Blue Chip Bridge 6.7.1 and Q-Plus 15.3.

Table Manager is used to run the competition and it requires that the Blue Chip Protocol is supported in the programs. The protocol is a requirement in the WCBC competition.  Only the included programs are supporting Blue Chip Protocol in the commercial versions,  The other programs only include Blue Chip Protocol support in the versions used for WCBC and can not be used in this competition. 

Annas, Mikaels, Roys and Sabines deals (400)  from the Challenge are used. The results are compared against Nooks (and Humans) performances.  

The WBridge5 Defender setup:  Strength = 4 and Thinking Time = 20s (the same as in the Human Challenge).

The WBridge5 Challenger setup: Strength = 5 and Thinking Time = 40s.  

Q-Plus Bridge and Blue Chip Bridge are set to maximum strength.

After the competition the follow deals are removed:   

- Deals where the bidding are different from 1NT - 2NT - 3NT or 1NT - 3NT. Else the defence will have extra info.

- Deals where the lead and second play, third play... by East are different and have impact on the final results.

The Final Result:

Program                    No of Boards      Points       Nook       Human                                                                    Blue Chip Bridge                     141            748          1138             991                                                                          WBridge5                                 137          1056          1190            989                                                                        Q-Plus Bridge                          113            820           948            834 

The result is expected and shows that Nook is superior to all three programs and probably to not included programs, e.g. Jack, MicroBridge and Synrey Bridge. It is interesting that WBridge5 performs better than Humans in the competition and that Q-Plus Bridge managed almost as well as the World Champions.

There is a questions marks for WBridge5 performance in the real Challenge. It was running under Linux and it has been confirmed by Yves Costel  that running on this platform can create bugs that will not occur on Windows. Nook has been trained with WBridge5 and could have used the bugs to it's advantage. So the conclusion is that Nooks points should be reduced to compensate for this advantage, but how much is not clear.  

PBN and CSV Files:

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