🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan9.192644.24693@fcom.cc.utah.edu> freier@mail.physics.utah.edu (rodney james freier) writes:
>In article <LAINS.93Jan8190731@world.std.com>, lains@world.std.com (Layne L Ainsworth) writes:
>|> 
>|> On the BlackJack problem:
>|> 
>|> aIt might be knd of interesting to give as input the history of all
>|> cards turned up in the game (current shoe). Emergent card counting!
>
>   Yes, that should give a better playing strategy, but at a huge cost.
>To make a hit/stay decision, you need to know the value of your hand and
>some reasonable number of the cards that have appeared up to this point.  
>This should always include the dealer's upcard and your two cards.

It might be possible to allow some card counting without the huge costs you
assume.  For starters, one can make significant modification of the house
percentage just by counting aces, face cards, and 10s.  Additionally, one
advantage that blackjack has over card games such as poker is that the card
suit has no value.  A jack of diamonds is equivalent in all cases to a jack
of spades.  This means that you only need to keep track of 13 categories
with a value from 0-4, hence only 39 bits and not the 52 you mentioned.
You could even decrease this number by storing all cards with a value of 10
as a single number (now we are down to 32 bits, and only 8 bits to count
aces and cards with a value of 10.)
>
>    Let me compare that with the string size for the original problem.
>
>     Item             Number of possibilities
>     Hand's value        9
>     dealers upcard      52
>     Is hand splitable?  2
>      
>    This gives only 9*2*52 = 936 bits per string, or 117 bytes.  That would

Or we could try this:

cards in hand:	10 bits, 5 per card (values 0-16, suit is irrellevant)
dealers upcard: 5 bits

By ignoring suit you will be able to cut out a major amount of noise from
the strings you proposed.  We could even add the 32 bits necessary to count
a full deck as mentioned previously and still be way under the 936 bits you
suggest.  Then again, I could be missing something very obvious here...it
has been a long day... :)

jim




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