Hans van Staveren's Dealer

13 Jan 1999 - I'm proud to tell you that I have finished modifying the 'dealer' program in order to allow for exhaustive simulation when 2 hands are completely known (it took me 5 hours, much less than I thought...). It seems to work so far on a small set of tests (only 5 of them). Does somebody here know where I could e-mail Hans van Staveren? I want to send him the code and ask him if we may release a new version. I will perform some other automatic tests and debugging and purify/comment the new code. I expect to release this for the beginning of February.

Interested persons must respond via rec.games.bridge as Francois does not have email at this time. .. ed

New Staveren Dealer Version
Enjoy, Henk Uijterwaal

Feb 14, 1999 - I've made a new version of Hans van Staveren's dealer program. This version includes:

0. All the changes that I made for my 1996 version of the program.
1. Output in PBN format, for further analysis by other programs (e.g. generate hands and have GIB play them).
2. A better random generator (thanks to Bruce Moore), including an option to set your random seed.
3. Francois Dellacherie's code for an exhaust mode. This is an alpha version which I'll describe better by the time I understand it myself.

Details and download click here.

Thu, 8 Apr 1999
Ib Christian Bank

Can I find Hans van Staverens program Dealer anywhere compiled and linked in a version that can be used on a Windows NT 4.0? The older DOS-version can't run on my NT-workstation.

If not, are there any other software with similar facilities as Dealer on the Internet for NT.

Thu, 8 Apr 1999
Alex Martelli

One version is at http://www.compart.fi/~kgb/all_data/dealerPC.zip -- it is not an "official release", but, anyway, I've been running it on WinNT 4.0 for a while now, without problems. I know Henk will release a newer/more solid version shortly, but meanwhile you might be able to use that one.

Yes, there is other such stuff, for example see:
http://www.best.com/~thomaso/deal2.0/
really excellent if you know and love TCL, because that is what it uses as its "constraints and actions language". However, AFAIK, that is only available in source form -- you need to obtain Tcl/Tk, and a C compiler, from elsewhere (e.g. from the net at Cygnus, http://www.cygnus.com), and build the thing -- basically, at least right now, it seems a "for programmers only" deal (pun deliberate:-).

I suspect non-programmers will find Dealer simpler, despite Deal's advantages (one, key to me, advantage of the newest version of Dealer, is that it can drive GIB's Bridge.Exe to do double-dummy simulation to see how many tricks is par for a certain deal with specified strain and declarer).

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