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Play Blackjack with PHP
Zack Coburn writes "The latest Codewalkers PHP Coding Contest invites PHP programmers to compete by creating a PHP script that interfaces with a special PHP library to play the game of Blackjack. Judging will happen as follows: 'A number of random decks will be generated, for each random rules will be used. Each script will then play all these decks, so each script will play under exactly the same conditions. In the end, the sum of all the money gained will determine the winner. In case of a tie, the running time will be the tie-breaker.' Some of the sixteen prizes include Cerberus Encoder, PHPEd, Macromedia Studio MX, SourceGuardian Pro, and Zend Studio." Here's a hint: count cards. :)
Just a word to the wise, the deadline for submission to this contest is February 29th. Clearly it's possible to write this type of script in a short period of time but for hobby-type programming contents, perhaps it would be more worthwhile to get this contest posted a bit before the deadline?
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Counting cards dosent really help you untill atleast half way through the deck. Hence why most good cheats will bet the minimum every hand and count the cards as they play, then bring in another player to bet the max while relying on signals from the player who has the count.
I'm not saying player swapping is nessisary in a PHP implementation, but anyone working on this should not rely on the count data untill atleast half the cards are gone. Which will leave another loophole for the programmer to account for: there can be anywhere from 1 to 10 decks.
A good blackjack player (not just a cheat) can not only count cards, but intimately knows their favorite version of the blackjack odds table, and most importantly how to bet to minimize the risk to their seed money and maximize profits when the cards are in their favor.
Another thing that must be compensated for is the greatest tool in any players bag of tricks. The ability to just get up and walk away. If the cards aren't treating you right, move to another table. This dosen't work in tournements, but is a great tactic for limiting your losses.. which is casino speak for "winning".
Oh, and when testing, make sure your shuffle is truely random.
symetrix. We are building a religion, a limited edition.
I wonder if they're just doing an "else if" in the rules even if it's a logic path which can never even be encountered to begin with.
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
My first reaction to this is that they test them all against the same deals, so there's not much luck, but on further reflection there is luck, it's just more subtle than the luck you deal with in the casino.
:(
The luck in this game is whether or not the deals that everyone gets are the type of deals that your scripts handles well.
So based on this, I think the winning strategy is the following:
Write a script that will do very well against a certain kinds of draws, and poorly against others. This would be a poor strategy if you were playing for money, and got to keep the net, but that isn't the game. The game here is that if you do the best (or one of the best) you win, and everything else loses. So losing badly isn't any worse than doing well but not the best. So take advantage of this by writing an aggresive strategy that will lose on most draws, but is sure to win on some. This is much better than writing a conservative script that will do well on any draw, but will always lose to whichever aggressive script happened to hit on the particular draw that was used.
When they run the contest, most of the entries will play a conservative strategy, and end up in a nice bell curve around a reasonable return. But the winner will be some off the wall script that does something crazy that happened to pay off against the draw they used.
How crazy it will take to win will of course depend on the number of entries.
You can be a sure winner if you get enough friends to enter with different aggresive strategies to cover all possible draws.
I wish I wasn't too busy to do it myself
- Funbobby
Bad hint.
Card counting will be of limited value, since:
- the number of decks you are playing is so low compared to the variance of the game that you are not even close to the "long run". Luck will dominate.
- the game has some non-standard rules (i.e. push if you and dealer both bust; player blackjack loses to dealer blackjack) that most strategies out there are not correct for the game.
Given the low number of hands to play, you should exploit tournament strategies, not card counting.
Posted anonymously since I don't want to end up in the Griffin book.......