After years of limited progress, since around the end of the 20th century the field of computer bridge has made major advances.
Alvin Levy, ACBL Board member, initiated this championship and has coordinated the event annually since its inception.
[7] The format is a round-robin event, followed by a semi-final and then a final, with scoring in IMPs (and Victory Points may be used to resolve ties).
Two years later, GIB became the world champion in computer bridge, and also had a 12th place score (11210) in declarer play compared to 34 of the top humans in the 1998 Par Contest (including Zia Mahmood).
[10] However, such a par contest measures technical bridge analysis skills only[clarification needed], and in 1999 Zia beat various computer programs, including GIB, in an individual round robin match.
[volume & issue needed] In 2009, Phillip Martin, an expert player, began a four-year project in which he played against the champion bridge program, Jack.
Today's top-level bridge programs deal with this probabilistic nature by generating many samples representing the unknown hands.
This testing is done using a so-called "double-dummy solver" that uses extensive search algorithms to determine the optimum line of play for both parties.
Yet, whereas computer chess has taught programmers little about building machines that offer human-like intelligence, more intuitive and probabilistic games such as bridge might provide a better testing ground.
These days, few editors of books and magazines will solely rely on humans to analyse bridge problems before publications.