EUGENE–When the best bridge players on Earth gather Aug. 21 to Sept. 4 in Lille, France at the 1998 World Bridge Championships, for the first time one of the competitors will be a computer program.

The program is called GIB, short for Goren In a Box. GIB will be the non-human participant in the Par Contest, a showcase for individual players to demonstrate their ability to make the best possible card plays. GIB and some 20 of the world’s top bridge players will display their talents at playing hands designed by Swiss bridge master Pietro Bernasconi. A grand prize of 25,000 Swiss francs ($16,750 U.S.) will be awarded to the winner although only human competitors are eligible to take home winnings. The competition concludes on Saturday, Aug. 23.

"GIB is a better than average bridge player," says the program’s author Matthew Ginsberg, a University of Oregon computer scientist who specializes in artificial intelligence. "But its card play–the thing tested in the Par Contest–is world class."

GIB demonstrated its power recently against a pair of human bridge masters at a demonstration match at the North American Bridge Championships held July 28 in Chicago. After 14 deals, the human players defeated GIB, but only by a thin margin. In computer-against-computer competitions held this summer at the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-98) in Madison, Wis., GIB obliterated all other computer programs, establishing itself as the preeminent computer player in the world.

"In these competitions GIB did remarkably well, even though match play is not its forte," Ginsberg says. "But in the direct card play of the Par competition at the World Championships, we will see GIB doing what GIB does best."

Computers and humans achieve their technical skill using very different kinds of intelligence, explains Ginsberg. It is a case of the machine’s brute force versus the human’s raw wit and animal cunning. A human bridge player in analyzing a hand typically considers approximately 50 positions, while GIB will consider half-a-million.

"Our brains are good at pattern matching; machines are good at sifting through vast numbers of possibilities," Ginsberg says.

GIB shares some features with IBM’s Deep Blue, the chess-playing program that beat chess champion Gary Kasparov last year. Both exploit the vast computational power of the machine to achieve expert level performance in a specific domain. But while Deep Blue is a massively parallel supercomputer, programmed and operated by a team of experts, "GIB is a straightforward software application that runs on a PC," Ginsberg explains.

"We may have a long way to go before GIB will be able to beat the best human players in team play," Ginsberg says, "but doing well in the Par Contest will mark an important milestone in the march toward that goal."

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