[david_c]

Another little request: it would be nice if we could use suit symbols in the description, perhaps by typing !C, !D etc. like in BBO.

[Rain]

One problem when merging posts into another thread is posts are listed in strict chronological order---may be hard to understand what's going on. Anyway, merged.

[pigpenz]

actually full disclosure is nice, but if there were secondary/tertiary etc trees available on the convention card button on the botton of the bbo toolbar it would probably be easier to do all that we are trying to do with full disclosure.

[fred]

david_c, on Sep 5 2005, 01:08 PM, said:

Another little request: it would be nice if we could use suit symbols in the description, perhaps by typing !C, !D etc. like in BBO.

This will certainly happen eventually.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[fred]

Chamaco, on Sep 5 2005, 12:24 PM, said:

david_c, on Sep 5 2005, 12:19 PM, said:

I don't find the "possible outcomes" section very useful. I've found that there are very few bids which actually reduce the set of possible outcomes (apart from sign-offs) and those that do are only by inference anyway. So I'd vote for this to be removed, as it's rather cluttering up the output.

A checkbox/pulldown menuitem specifying:


"Sets forcing pass at:
- any level
- XXX level and higher"

might be more compact ?

I personally think the notion of suit agreement is important, both in terms of defining a system and in terms of information that the opponents rate to care about.

However, if I receive enough negative comments about this feature, I could probably be persuaded to get rid of it (or at least make display of the information an option).

Fred Gtielman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[fred]

pigpenz, on Sep 5 2005, 06:07 PM, said:

actually full disclosure is nice, but if there were secondary/tertiary etc trees available on the convention card button on the botton of the bbo toolbar it would probably be easier to do all that we are trying to do with full disclosure.

Most likely what you see when you click the CONV button in BBO will be completely different once FD is integrated into the BBO client.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[FrancesHinden]

hrothgar, on Sep 5 2005, 07:30 AM, said:

I'll repeat an earlier comment:

I would would prefer to "Bid-Edit" to be optimized for ease of use.
I strongly suspect "serious" design work will require some kind of scripting system to automatically populate the bididng tree.

I strongly agree with this.
I think the concept of having a well-defined text file to define the meaning of bidding sequences would be a great addition to online bridge as well as being a good tool if/when it is integrated into a hand generation program.


p.s. I note a lot of similarities to a commercially available peice of software called HCS System Notebook.

Edit: I realise you might take that as accusing you of plagiarism. I didn't mean that at all... I meant that I'm going to remember why I never really used that piece of software!

[FrancesHinden]

Having got the compliments out of the way, I'll tell you the biggest problem I have with using a tool such as this to define my systemic agreements.

I have two regular partnerships, and in both of them I play a natural(ish) based system with some gadgets. The best-documented system has a 60-odd page word file. Of those 60 pages, about 5 are on opening leads and defensive carding. Of the rest, only about half is content that can be transcribed directly into bidding trees such as FD offers.

About a third of the rest is stuff that could be turned into bidding trees with a script and some intelligence such as Richard describes. Take the simple sentence "Responses to 1S of 2NT and above as to 1H but a level higher, except where obvious". It's the "where obvious" bit that's pretty clear to a human, but hard to script (such as there's a sequence after 1H-2S (artificial) that eventually shows 5-6 in the majors; having opened 1S you can't be 5-6 in the majors but you can be 5-5, while if you open 1H you can't be 5-5 in the majors).

Another third is general stuff on approach (what we consider to be an opening bid or a pre-empt or an overcall, what is our general style on upgrades & downgrades, and so forth). This is important to disclose to the opponents but doesn't fit anywhere nicely into a set of definitions of opening bids etc without a vast amount of repitition.

The last third consists of "meta-rules" about bids. For example, there is a couple of pages on the use of 4NT in non-competitive auctions. One part of this says "If it is possible to agree a major explicitly via a forcing raise or a cue bid, and this is not done, then 4NT is natural." This is quite a simple rule, but it doesn't map onto a "bidding tree" in any type of easy way, because the rule can apply in a huge number of possible auctions.

We even have chains of rules. There is a set of rules for when 2NT in competition in natural. After that, there is another rule for determining what an artificial 2NT means (and this in a partnership that doesn't play what is traditionally known as good/bad 2NT at all...).

As a minor (but to my mind interesting) point: we've been playing together seriously for about 15 years. We rarely add or change the meaning of bits of "system" (about once a year, or so, things get mildly improved or tightened up). But most of the pages that have been added are trying to document stylistic things that have come up, or strange auctions that we agreed afterwards didn't mean what the system file implied they ought to mean.

I'm not trying to pick holes for the sake of it - I'm explaining why I will never put my systemic agreements into this type of tool for my use, only if it's required by the event I'm playing in.

[hrothgar]

FrancesHinden, on Sep 5 2005, 11:57 PM, said:

I'm not trying to pick holes for the sake of it - I'm explaining why I will never put my systemic agreements into this type of tool for my use, only if it's required by the event I'm playing in.

There's an old saying: "Don't make the best the enemy of the good..."
I sincerely doubt that I'll ever code a complete bidding system using full disclosure. This doesn't mean that it isn't worth entering descriptions for the most common sequences.

In an earlier post, I noted that players should distinquish between system templates (the actual .sxc files) and the editors used to create them. Once very interesting possibility would be leveraging the BBO client as an editor to create .bss files... Imagine if you had the ability to "tell" BBO that you wanted to start building a new .bss file. From this point forward, all alerts and announcements would automatically be saved as a system file. In theory, this system should converage pretty quickly on an optimal system definition. Mopre formally, the expected order in which data would be entered into the .bss file would be a function of the frequency of the bid.

Needless to say, you'd still want the ability to go in an edit the file in order to clean up typos and the like. However, I think that the idea has a lot going for it...

[MarceldB]

How do I get rid of the "open squares" in the description box, caused by ctrl-enter.
In other words is there an other method to go to the next line if the line itself is not completed.

I prefer this in case of f.e. multi-bids to keep a clear/better view of the different meanings.

Marcel

[badderzboy]

One small thing, I've been playing around and there is a minor issue when the opps open say 1♣ artificial where 2♣ is now a natural bid and vice-versa where 1♣ opener is natural and so 2♣ is artificial - any thoughts on how to include this in Full Disclosure? as you can't enter it as both artificial/natural

Hopefully a useful small tip as well - I was playing with the defence to 1NT - if you play the same defence to 1NT-? as 1NT-P-P-? then save the file after compiliing your defence and then use Notepad to copy and paste your bids and then add PP in each copied line after 1NT in the textline so
*001NTD... becomes *001NTPPD for example and so on...

Also if you have any lines partially filled in you wish to remove it is easier to use Notepad to delete the full erroneous line then have then appear as blanks?

Steve

[shoeless]

hrothgar to the rescue. I think that idea has more than a lot going for it - it's hot.

[david_c]

fred, on Sep 5 2005, 07:34 PM, said:

I personally think the notion of suit agreement is important, both in terms of defining a system and in terms of information that the opponents rate to care about.

Right ... but something like "agrees ♥" or "♥s are agreed" would be a much clearer way of phrasing this, in my opinion. (And, a blank space would be so much clearer than "♣ ♦ ♥ ♠ NT Def".)

I don't think anyone really cares about the difference between "♣ ♦ ♥ ♠ NT" and "♣ ♥ ♠ NT", which I get after a splinter response to 1NT, for example.

[hrothgar]

Hi Fred

General question regarding the Full Disclosure file format. From what I can tell, Full Disclosure works by enumerating bidding sequence as a separate entry in the file. [I suspect that all the leaidng YNNNNYN sequences are an attempt to compress the size of the tree and indicate whether a sequence like 1♠ - (P) - 2♣ is the same as the sequence P - (P) - 1♠ - (P) - 2♣, but I'm probably full of it)

There are pluses and minus associated with this approach:

The big advantage is that the file is relatively easy to read/understand. This means that its relatively easy to develop alternative mechanisms to populate a system file.

The big disadvantage is that files could get very large. [There are a LOT of different bidding sequences out there...].

Long term, it might be possible to "solve" the size issue by adopting a more complex file format that permits some kind of scripting. Short term I definetely think that "simple" is the way to go. If/when Full Disclosure takes off, you might decide to split the difference and adopt a more complex file format...

[fred]

MarceldB, on Sep 6 2005, 06:59 AM, said:

How do I get rid of the "open squares" in the description box, caused by ctrl-enter.
In other words is there an other method to go to the next line if the line itself is not completed.

I prefer this in case of f.e. multi-bids to keep a clear/better view of the different meanings.

Marcel

Control-Enter is supposed to work and it seems to be working ok for me without any "open squares".

If you e-mail a copy of your file that produces open squares (fred@bridgebase.com) I will figure out what is going on and fix this for the next version. If you do this, please let me know an example bidding sequence that results in the open squares appearing.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[Free]

Is it possible to give an explanation to "pass" as 'opening bid'? Not only HUM's need this, but also for example Lorenzo-systems (which use 2X openings as 0-7HCP with 4+X when NV) which are classified as red...

[fred]

Free, on Sep 6 2005, 06:55 PM, said:

Is it possible to give an explanation to "pass" as 'opening bid'? Not only HUM's need this, but also for example Lorenzo-systems (which use 2X openings as 0-7HCP with 4+X when NV) which are classified as red...

For now I suggest you put it in your "system summary" area. There is a reasonable chance I will eventually provide an explicit place for this.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[inquiry]

badderzboy, on Sep 6 2005, 07:39 AM, said:

One small thing, I've been playing around and there is a minor issue when the opps open say 1♣ artificial where 2♣ is now a natural bid and vice-versa where 1♣ opener is natural and so 2♣ is artificial - any thoughts on how to include this in Full Disclosure? as you can't enter it as both artificial/natural

Hi Steve,

There is no reason to define just one "bidding system" using FD. You can have one when you play against Precison, One when you play against forcing pass, etc.

Here is the ID, create your normal system, and save two copies of it,

Then create a new one where they open 1♣ forcing. Then describe your bids schedule over that... and then merge this with your normal system.... and call it over forcing club.

If your treatment over weak notrump is different than over strong NT, you can do the same... Then eventually, you will swtich systems loaded on BBO depending upon who you sit down against...

This is easier than it sounds.

[fred]

badderzboy, on Sep 6 2005, 11:39 AM, said:

One small thing, I've been playing around and there is a minor issue when the opps open say 1♣ artificial where 2♣ is now a natural bid and vice-versa where 1♣ opener is natural and so 2♣ is artificial - any thoughts on how to include this in Full Disclosure? as you can't enter it as both artificial/natural

The "qualify" field is intended for this purposes (ie to create new branches of the bidding tree depending on the meaning of an opp's bid).

Note that this field is only enabled for opps' bids so either "contstructive" or "we open" must be set to "off" in order to sue it.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[Al_U_Card]

fred, on Sep 4 2005, 09:36 AM, said:

Deanrover, on Sep 4 2005, 02:47 AM, said:

Fred - are you accepting suggestions for alternative names than "full disclosure"? Don't really like the name......

Yes please feel free to suggestion new names. I am not crazy about "Full Disclosure" either (but it is starting to grow on me).

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

Might I suggest CDD = Call Definition Directory?