[Blackjack] How many games?

How many games will there be in the judging? I ask because I'm finding that I'm needing a lot of games to get a reasonably accurate measure of whether a change is an improvement or not, i.e. 100+. If a lot of people are getting near the 60s per game mark then judging could take a very long time. Admittedly I seem to be averaging about 0.1s per game so it may not be a problem.

Ben Hague

Most probably it will be 160 games - each combination of rules possible (except maxbet). If the scripts are mostly very slow, though, it will be less. Can't waste too much server time ;)

In that case, I might just as well send in miniplay.php (with my own bestval function, of course). In just 160 games, it has as good a chance as a 'more intelligent' script, because results WILL vary depending on the composition of the deck. My script averages a positive result, but in a random game, it may lose 700 bucks. If the assignment were to program a script that produced the best result for a given deck, scoring them like you said would be acceptable. IMHO the assignment is to program a script that will have the best advantage on the house. You'd need to score at least 1000 decks (random rules) to assess this. I understand that a maximum execution time of 60 secs does not allow this, but scoring less decks has too big a chance for a single strategy to luck out.

Well, I don't think miniplay.php will do as well as possible.. We'll see

Just to be sure...i'd have to change GameStart() to StartGame, right?

What the rules say
(StartGame)

Ok, this is somewhat on topic... I was wondering if there's an easy way to have the script play multiple games at once. Right now when it's done it does exit() which kills everything. Is there some way to have it keep going or restart without making major changes to the library? Thanks.

Edit: Never mind, I think I can figure it out. Replacing exit() with a function that restarts the game.

Here's what I did: I made the lib into a class named blackjack. Instead of calling exit, I created a function named GameExit that records the final gamestate into a class variable named __finalstate. It also sets the boolean class variable GameEnd.

now I can run 10.000 games like this:



Don't forget to put '$this->' before all variable names in the original script.

Of course, my script is a lot more complex, and I could let you in on all the details, but then I'd have to kill you. ;)

Haha. I actually did figure it out last night. Didn't make a class like you did, but the idea is similar in terms of the for() loop and function call instead of exit(). Thanks anyway and good luck in the contest!