How does AI, in a game as complex as bridge, manage to deal with a human partner, or even an AI partner? Seems like an answer we could find out.
> The information and possibilities really need to be mediated by some kind of intermediate, rules-based description, which can be provided to the opponents as well.
This is standardized at tournaments (I'm sure you know that.)
Still a few humans writing on the internet... at least for now ;) I'm sure the green username doesn't help either, I just switched to a new account a few days ago.
>This is standardized at tournaments (I'm sure you know that.)
Right, in human play we have convention cards (pieces of paper that are essentially big forms for specifying common agreements), although these don't cover every situation.
What I was getting at was more along the lines of some kind of general schema that would allow fully describing any individual bid. But then there's also a problem where such a schema inherently limits the creativity available in constructing a bidding system, if all the bids must fit into what is expressible by this schema.
My personal approach would be to try to decompose it into two subproblems: learning a set of agreements, and optimizing results given a fixed set of agreements. Then you could try to solve the former problem using the results from the latter one. But even playing well under a fixed set of agreements isn't so easy to solve.