Good question! I don’t know the overall answer but I do have a piece of context on this:
(Update: I read your post more closely and realize that while your post is titled as a question, you weren’t literally asking for others to answer it and you do a pretty good job of answering it yourself. Nice analysis :)
Bridge Base Online is one of the leading (probably the leading) online bridge platforms. It is very common on Bridge Base to play with robots (i.e. automated bridge-playing bots, no robotics involved). My dad is an avid bridge player on there. I think he plays with bots the majority of the time just out of convenience. Of course because of the way duplicate bridge is designed, everyone else at your table can be a robot and you still get to play against other humans who are playing identical hands/boards with identical bots.
I get the sense that the robots on Bridge Base are not advanced AIs. They may even just be hand-coded bots operating totally based on rules and randomness with no machine learning involved. So it’s not like people on Bridge Base are playing with AlphaGo-level bridge robots. Such robots may exist but they’re not what this website uses, at least not for its everyday bridge bots.
I agree with your assessment of the BridgeBase ‘bots. They can appear to play very well a lot of the time but often make plays that look foolish, or sometimes bizarre. Nook played against the best (by competition) bridge ‘bots available. However, against Nook, as I understand, even these ’bots sometimes made poor plays that quite average human players would know not to make.
Good question! I don’t know the overall answer but I do have a piece of context on this:
(Update: I read your post more closely and realize that while your post is titled as a question, you weren’t literally asking for others to answer it and you do a pretty good job of answering it yourself. Nice analysis :)
Bridge Base Online is one of the leading (probably the leading) online bridge platforms. It is very common on Bridge Base to play with robots (i.e. automated bridge-playing bots, no robotics involved). My dad is an avid bridge player on there. I think he plays with bots the majority of the time just out of convenience. Of course because of the way duplicate bridge is designed, everyone else at your table can be a robot and you still get to play against other humans who are playing identical hands/boards with identical bots.
I get the sense that the robots on Bridge Base are not advanced AIs. They may even just be hand-coded bots operating totally based on rules and randomness with no machine learning involved. So it’s not like people on Bridge Base are playing with AlphaGo-level bridge robots. Such robots may exist but they’re not what this website uses, at least not for its everyday bridge bots.
I agree with your assessment of the BridgeBase ‘bots. They can appear to play very well a lot of the time but often make plays that look foolish, or sometimes bizarre. Nook played against the best (by competition) bridge ‘bots available. However, against Nook, as I understand, even these ’bots sometimes made poor plays that quite average human players would know not to make.