Making the call: Problem hands
You can’t always find one "right" bid for a hand. If only it were so. Many hands present close-call decisions.
For many hands, you become like the baseball umpire who decides whether each pitch is a ball or a strike. Some calls are obvious; others raise the dander of the pitcher and the batter.
One of the most popular bridge magazines in the world, Bridge World, features a great monthly column called "Master Solvers Club." In this column, 25 or so top bridge experts are shown a hand and told how the bidding goes up to a certain point, where it is now the experts’ turn to bid. Each expert makes what he thinks is the right bid and usually makes a comment to justify the bid. You’d think that most of the experts would come up with the same bid for the same hand, but it never happens. Each sample hand attracts at least three, four, and sometimes qas many as eight different bids, plus lively (and funny) comments about the hand.
Sometimes the magazine tries to trick the experts by feeding them the same hands they gave them 20 or more years ago, to see if they come up with the same bid. Most of the experts don’t recognize the hands and come up with different bids and different comments, sometimes even ridiculing bids they themselves suggested in the past of r the same hand!
--Bridge for Dummies 2nd Edition, by Eddie Canter, p. 155
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Afterword by the blog author:
We are talking about a finite universe when we discuss bridge hands. The number of bridge hands is large, but it is finite (52!/39!)/13!, which is 635,013,599,600. This is purely a mathematical issue, yet agreement about proper bidding is impossible. One reason is that the number of possible bidding sequences is even larger -- billions of billions of possible bidding auctions.
The central problem is that the bidding conventions themselves are open to different interpretations. These conventions sometimes contradict themselves in particular, special circumstances, especially because the conventions overlap.
So we have to be careful about models, even if they are entirely mathematical.
What does this tell us about the social "sciences"?!
You can’t always find one "right" bid for a hand. If only it were so. Many hands present close-call decisions.
For many hands, you become like the baseball umpire who decides whether each pitch is a ball or a strike. Some calls are obvious; others raise the dander of the pitcher and the batter.
One of the most popular bridge magazines in the world, Bridge World, features a great monthly column called "Master Solvers Club." In this column, 25 or so top bridge experts are shown a hand and told how the bidding goes up to a certain point, where it is now the experts’ turn to bid. Each expert makes what he thinks is the right bid and usually makes a comment to justify the bid. You’d think that most of the experts would come up with the same bid for the same hand, but it never happens. Each sample hand attracts at least three, four, and sometimes qas many as eight different bids, plus lively (and funny) comments about the hand.
Sometimes the magazine tries to trick the experts by feeding them the same hands they gave them 20 or more years ago, to see if they come up with the same bid. Most of the experts don’t recognize the hands and come up with different bids and different comments, sometimes even ridiculing bids they themselves suggested in the past of r the same hand!
--Bridge for Dummies 2nd Edition, by Eddie Canter, p. 155
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Afterword by the blog author:
We are talking about a finite universe when we discuss bridge hands. The number of bridge hands is large, but it is finite (52!/39!)/13!, which is 635,013,599,600. This is purely a mathematical issue, yet agreement about proper bidding is impossible. One reason is that the number of possible bidding sequences is even larger -- billions of billions of possible bidding auctions.
The central problem is that the bidding conventions themselves are open to different interpretations. These conventions sometimes contradict themselves in particular, special circumstances, especially because the conventions overlap.
So we have to be careful about models, even if they are entirely mathematical.
What does this tell us about the social "sciences"?!
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