Happy New Game – Round 0 Summary

Moves can be found here.

This was a decent round. We got 12 turnovers, most of which are in-suit. In Monkey-speak our evaluation is 128 points, assuming turnovers are worth 10, in-suit builds are worth 1, and Spider GM hasn’t forgotten how to count. On the minus side, every column has at least one face-down card and we’ve all had our fair share of demoralising losses where no empty column was obtained for the entire game. Still, I think it’s too early to worry about that yet.

There were no complicated decisions to make and I would expect any half-decent player (such as my famous brother Terence Tao who introduced me to the game many years ago) to reach the same game state – ignoring some minor variation such as flipping a coin on the last turnover.

I expect future rounds will pose some more interesting decisions – as well as further insights into the strengths and weaknesses of Ninja Monkey’s algorithm 😊 Obviously I was never expecting miracles from NM, but having gained some experience with GitHub and Python’s tkinter package, I’m not in a position to complain. At least I have some idea for further improving the algorithm. Whether I actually get enough time to implement this is another story. But we digress.

With IM Bug is returning to the fold in about one week’s time, this promises to be more exciting than the current rot13(fuvgfgbez) involving Novak Djokovic and Australia. 😉 Game on!