[Trinidad]

dburn, on 2014-October-31, 21:32, said:

Has it never occurred to anyone that there should be? Or is it really the case that "the rules aren't designed to prevent out-and-out cheating"? If so, are not the rules rather feebly designed? Is there some other game or sport that has rules allowing "out-and-out cheating"? If not, why not?

I am no expert on the rules of soccer, but I doubt that the FIFA rules stipulate that you are not allowed to poison the food of the opponent's center forward, or threaten the goalie's wife and kids. They probably don't forbid installing big ventilation systems (operated by the home team's utility crew) behind the goals either.

Curious...

Rik

[pran]

dburn, on 2014-October-31, 21:32, said:

Curious, this.

The consensus appears to be that: there is no actual rule of the game preventing a player from participating if he has prior knowledge of the hands that have been dealt.

Has it never occurred to anyone that there should be? Or is it really the case that "the rules aren't designed to prevent out-and-out cheating"? If so, are not the rules rather feebly designed? Is there some other game or sport that has rules allowing "out-and-out cheating"? If not, why not?

Has it never occurred to you that as Bridge is a game for Gentlemen and Ladies everybody should (instinctively) know what to do and what not to do?
You might also take a look at Law 6D which has some relevance in this respect.

dburn, on 2014-October-31, 21:32, said:

In passing, I am not sure that I know what pran means by "a perfectly shuffled pack of cards". Sally Brock and I differ as to whether six or seven imperfect riffle shuffles are enough to destroy information. Poker dealers believe that washing the deck, then riffling thrice, then box-cutting is enough. Hans van Staveren may have been the first to collect enough entropy to overcome the PRNG phenomenon, but even that...

Quite correct observation, we often use the word "random" without knowing what we really mean.

First of all: There is no such thing as a single random number (or a single random instance)!

But we can have numbers (or even a single number) drawn at random from a set of numbers which means that there is no way one can predict any particulars of the next number drawn other than that the number belongs to the set.

Testing for randomness is a rather complicated process. For example testing a dice requires not only to show that each of the six possible results occurs at approximately the same frequency but also that deviations from the averages corresponds with what should be expected. If you throw a dice 600 times and note that you have exactly 100 each of the numbers from 1 to 6 then that dice is almost certainly not random. (It could still be, that is why repeated tests are neccessary!)

I shall not go into more details but only say that when I test dealer programs for randomness I require at least 8000 deals which I split into ten subsets of 800 deals. Counting such parameters as distributions, HCP strengths and even single card locations I measure for each subset how far away the results are from the statistical averages and require an acceptable distribution of such deviations over the ten subsets. The test is then repeated for several sets of 8000 deals before I am satisfied with the results.

Complex? Sure. Neccessary? Absolutely. I have tested some well recognized programs during the last 30 years and more often than I care about had to report that the program did not pass my tests. In one case I found that the Queen of Clubs on the average was located 40% of the times in North and only 10% of the times in South. (East and West shared the remainding 50% equally). After I alerted the owner of the program this error was fixed and later tests were all successful. (I never understood what could cause this error but nor did I really ever care.)

So what about manual shuffling? The only manual method I can think of as satisfactory for randomness is to use dice (or similar equipment) and let the outcome of a sufficient number of throws determine the locations of the cards. This is of course absolutely unrealistic.

Already Culbertson made it quite clear in his books that the players should be aware of insufficient randomness in deals for Bridge. At his time there was of course no alternative to manual shuffling.

Now as a curiosity: How big is the "set" of possible deals for Bridge? Given the world population of approximately 7 Billion People (7 with nine zeroes), if each individual on Earth produce a new deal every second and no particular deal is ever repeated it will take almost 243 Billion years before all possible deals have been produced. (And if we include dealer and zone in the particulars of the deals we would even have to multiply this number by 16.)

[lamford]

Trinidad, on 2014-November-01, 02:03, said:

I doubt that the FIFA rules stipulate that you are not allowed to poison the food of the opponent's center forward

There were completely unconfirmed rumours, some years ago, that someone had tampered with the food of the Spurs team before they played a match against West Ham which the former needed to win to qualify for the Champions League. I am told that Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal manager, blocked an attempt to have this photoshop picture on the front cover of Private Eye, with the caption, "Prawn, sir?":

http://dday02.files....wenger_chef.jpg

[lamford]

pran, on 2014-November-01, 05:12, said:

Complex? Sure. Neccessary? Absolutely. I have tested some well recognized programs during the last 30 years and more often than I care about had to report that the program did not pass my tests.

I can report a similar experience with a game I created for online bookmakers. When testing it, I found that the ace of clubs did not appear in 10,000,000 deals, and the king of spades appeared twice as often as it should. The RNG was fine, but a >= had been wrongly put as <=, so that the ace of clubs only appeared if the RNG was <= to 0.0000000000000000, using a sixteen-digit RNG. The two of clubs, which needed the RNG to be <= 0.0192307692307692 was fine!

[Siegmund]

I seem to remember there being either a Law or an ACBL regulation that said something like "no result achieved by a player who has already seen the cards may stand." In 2006 I had a fight with a unit board after cancelling all 27 results achieved by the club manager's wife and her partner, because she had made the boards for a pre-duplicated event at the club and then played in that event. I remember having a very clear rule to cite by which I removed all of her scores.

But looking today at both the current and the 1997 law books, I can only find the one that says that if a player played a board twice, the second result may not stand. I thought that law used to be worded more generally, so that it applied equally to boards played twice because of mismovement, boards not shuffled from a previous session, and exposed hand records. Where did it go?

[RMB1]

Siegmund, on 2014-November-01, 09:55, said:

But looking today at both the current and the 1997 law books, I can only find the one that says that if a player played a board twice, the second result may not stand. I thought that law used to be worded more generally, so that it applied equally to boards played twice because of mismovement, boards not shuffled from a previous session, and exposed hand records. Where did it go?

Law 6D2

Quote

Unless the purpose of the tournament is the replay of past deals no result may stand if the cards are dealt without shuffle from a sorted deck or if the deal has been imported from a different session. (These provisions shall not prevent arrangements, where desired, for exchange of boards between tables.)

So it still has "boards not shuffled from a previous session"

[weejonnie]

Of course taking the laws literally - the dealer shouldn't cut the cards at all - unless asked.

Law 6A

Before play starts each pack is thoroughly shuffled. There is a cut if either opponent so requests.

With regards to randomisation - at Durham when we had manual dealing, it was standard practice for each person to shuffle the cards in their own hands at the end of the evening. This increased the entropy. Of course 7C says that the hands should be shuffled at the end of play (the reason for doing so was highlighted in a Bols Tip) - but this was often forgotten after the last round.

[barmar]

weejonnie, on 2014-November-01, 16:06, said:

Of course taking the laws literally - the dealer shouldn't cut the cards at all - unless asked.

Law 6A

Before play starts each pack is thoroughly shuffled. There is a cut if either opponent so requests.

The dealer cutting the cards himself can be considered part of shuffling it thoroughly (there are many ways to shuffle a deck, and some of them involve moving large groups of cards at once, just like a cut). The cut that the law refers to is an opponent cutting between the shuffle and the deal.

[barmar]

dburn, on 2014-October-31, 21:32, said:

Has it never occurred to anyone that there should be? Or is it really the case that "the rules aren't designed to prevent out-and-out cheating"? If so, are not the rules rather feebly designed? Is there some other game or sport that has rules allowing "out-and-out cheating"? If not, why not?

Many (most) sporting competitions prohibit use of performance-enhancing drugs. Are these found in the rules of the game, or the conditions of contest for the competitions? Or maybe they're in the codes of conduct for players in the leagues.