DEALER(6)
NAME
dealer - bridge hand generator
SYNOPSIS
dealer [-023ehuvmqV] [-p n] [-g n] [-s seed] [-l n] [inputfile]
DESCRIPTION AND EXAMPLE
The program dealer can be used to generate hands for partnerships bidding training or for generating statistics that can be used to design
conventions, or win postmortems.
- Running the program involves 3 steps. First, the user has to write an
input file containing hand-descriptions and action. A very simple example would look something like: - condition shape(north, any 4333 + any 4423) and hcp(north)>=19
action printall - The first line specifies a condition for the north hand, in this case,
a hand with 4333 or 4432 shape and at least 19 high card points. The
second line tells the program to print the 4 hands. The program reads
from standard input, so in principle, it is possible to enter the conditions directly into the program. Using a file is a lot more practical though, as it allows the user to re-use conditions and fine-tune the
conditions. - Then the program has to be run, it reads the file, looks at the various
command line switches and then produces a number of hands. The output
appears on the screen but can be re-directed to a file. - Finally, the user has to look at output and analyze the produced hands. Alternatively, the output can be used for a playing program.
OPTIONS
-e Exhaust mode (alpha version).
- -g number
- Maximum number of hands to generate (default is 1000000).
- -l number
- Instead of shuffling, deals are read from the file library.dat by
M. Ginsberg (see [1]). When using this, the tricks() function is quite fast and bridge.exe from GIB is not used. - [1] ftp://ftp.cirl.uoregon.edu/pub/users/ginsberg/bridge/
- -m Shows a progress meter.
- -p number
- Maximum number of hands to produce (default is 40).
- -q Suppress PBN output (useful for testing, then switch it back on
- when generating the "final" sample).
- -s number
- Uses number as the seed for the random generator, running the program twice with the same seed will produce the same sequence of
hands. - -u Select uppercase for the symbols "AKQJT" (default is lowercase).
- -v Toggle verbose output, prints statistics at the end of the run
- (default is on).
- -V Emit a version-identification string and exit.
- -h Help, prints the syntax.
- -0 No swapping, each deal is generated normally (shuffling) (default).
- -2 2-way swapping, after each shuffle another deal is generated by
- permuting E and W, leaving N and S in place (NB: not fully compatible with predeal).
- -3 3-way swapping, after each shuffle another 5 deals are generated by
- permuting E, W, and S every which way, leaving N in place (NB: not fully compatible with predeal).
BUGS
I would prefer if you did not use this program for generating hands for
tournaments. I have not investigated the random number generation
closely enough for me to be comfortable with that thought.
SEE ALSO
/usr/share/doc/dealer/Manual, dealer.dpp(6), deal(6).
AUTHORS
Hans van Staveren <sater@sater.home.cs.vu.nl>
Henk Uijterwaal <henk@ripe.net>
Manpage: Christoph Berg <cb@df7cb.de>
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
- This program is hereby put in the public domain. Do with it whatever
you want, but I would like you not to redistribute it in modified form without mentioning the fact of modification. I will accept bug reports and modification requests, without any obligation of course, but fixing bugs someone else put in is beyond me.