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Joe Dog Software

Proudly serving the Internets since 1999

Pinochle 1.0.7

Yesterday was Christmas and you know what? You can’t get a stinkin’ slice of pizza on Christmas. Hardly anything is open on December 25th. Christmas is basically house arrest.

To kill the time between Christmas morning and the grand re-opening of his coffee shop, Your JoeDog played a little pinochle. It’s a pretty good game. The computer bids well and plays a reasonably strong hand but — WTF? — the bid dialog box moves all over the place.

Each time you submit a bid, the dialog moves so you can’t just click a second time without moving your mouse. Well that’s annoying. Indeed. Your JoeDog fixed that yesterday. House arrest ended today….

Life is good.

[JoeDog: Pinochle-1.0.7]

 



It Knows Me Better Than I Know Myself….

robotI write a lot of software with which I interact. If it’s easy for me, then it’s easy for you. I try to keep it easy for me. JoeDog’s Pinochle is the first program against which I’ve competed. It’s been a surreal experience.

The program was designed to be competitive against me. Tonight it took two out of three games. The damn thing knows me inside and out. And why not? I wrote it. And while I can exploit some knowledge of its inter-workings, I can’t predict all its behavior. It was designed to learn bidding from experience.

Bidding is the hardest aspect of this game. The team that wins the bid has an incredible opportunity to earn a lot of points. At the same time, overbids come at a large price. A failure to make the bid means the bid is deducted from your score.

When the game was first released, its bids were implemented programmatically. I like to think I’m a pretty good programmer but that version of the game played like a moran. To improve it, I had the game play itself hundreds of thousands of times. It would store those results and use them to generate future bids.

This implementation has resulted in a much more competitive program. Now it bids more aggressively — much more aggressively. It bids like me which is odd because I didn’t tell it to do that. I told it to learn from its experience and as a result of that experience, its personality morphed into mine.

 



Pinochle

Today I’m pleased to announce the first public release of JoeDog’s Pinochle. It’s a computerized version of the classic card game. It plays a four-player variation in which you are paired with a computer player against two computer players. Exciting!

This project is notable for several reasons: 1.) It’s the first time I’ve released software with a graphical interface and 2.) it’s the first major project I’ve completed in java.

JoeDog’s Pinochle is the culmination of hundreds of hours of work over the past several years. The groundwork was laid on planes and trains. It offered an enjoyable way to pass the time as I sat in traveling tubes. Last September I finally achieved a functioning version of the game. Since then, I’ve honed its ability to play a descent game.

Because pinochle maintains a strict set of rules for governing play, most of the “intelligence” in this game was implemented programmatically. Unfortunately, its original ability to assess and bid a hand was very weak. In order to improve that, I’ve built experience into the game. It played itself for hundreds of hours and stored those outcomes. Now when it bids a hand, it consults past experience to shape future results. A skilled human can still beat it but give me time. It will get better with each ensuing release.

Future

I’m currently honing the game’s ability to beat the pants off you people. That may take some time. Once I’ve built adequate intelligence into the game I’d like to add more variation. A double-deck version will be added at some later date. I’d also like to add three and five player variations.

Licence

This game is currently licensed under the terms of shareware. It contains some code that was published without licensing terms and the author has not answered my inquiries about its license. It’s probably in the public domain but until I get verification I can’t release it under an open source license. If you’d like a copy of the code, send me an email. Until then, enjoy the binaries.