EUGENE, Ore.–It was the first time that a computer had ever been allowed to play bridge at so high a level of international competition and when the last card was played only 11 of the world’s best human players had managed to outperform the silicon-based competition.

This demonstration of computer-playing ability took place at this year’s Par Contest, held as part of the 1998 World Bridge Championships in Lille, France. The Par Contest is a showcase for individual players to demonstrate their ability to make the best possible card plays. At this year’s Par Contest, a computer program called "GIB" took twelfth place honors.

In two days of competition concluding on Aug. 23, GIB out-played more than 20 of the world’s top bridge players in a series of difficult deals designed by Swiss bridge master Pietro Bernasconi. After the first day of competition, GIB led all contenders with a score of 9,550 out of a possible 12,000–the second place competitor had around 8,100. In the second day of competition, less than a dozen human competitors were able to catch and surpassed GIB.

A grand prize of $35,000 was at stake in the competition, although only human competitors were eligible to take home winnings.

"I’m thrilled," says GIB’s creator Matthew Ginsberg, a University of Oregon computer scientist who specializes in artificial intelligence. "This shows that the same kinds of techniques that allowed Deep Blue to beat Kasparov in chess can be applied to other domains. This success makes it very clear that computer bridge players have arrived."

Following the competition, Swiss industrialist Serge Fradkoff offered a $100,000 prize for a showdown that would pit GIB against four of the world’s top players in match play.

GIB showed its power recently against a pair of human world bridge champions 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 the Par competition at the World Championships emphasizes card play, so there we saw 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 this approach 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.

GIB is the only computer program ever to have won master points in officially sanctioned tournament competition. The program also routinely plays against human competitors-sometimes 24 hours per day-on the Internet bridge club OKBridge located at <http://www.okbridge.com>.

"We still have a way to go before GIB will be able to beat the best human players in team play," Ginsberg says, "but coming this close to winning the Par Contest puts the bridge world on notice: that day is coming."

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