Preface

This is an impossible book.

Specifically, it is a book which contains all of the possible bridge deals.

Since there are exactly 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000 distinct bridge deals, and the Impossible Bridge Book contains all of them, one per page, an actual printed copy of this book would stretch from one side of the galaxy to the other.

Still, through the miracle of complex compression algorithms, I have a copy of this book. And I can give you access to any pages you'd like to see.

Okay, it's not really a book. The Impossible Bridge Book is a program which translates "page numbers" from 1 to 53,644,737,765,488,792,839,237,440,000 to unique bridge deals.

In fact, there are two books - one is the Andrews Edition, the other is the Pavlicek Edition. They use quite different algorithms. You can also view the "scrambled" editions of these books, which lets you see "normal-looking" hands for small values.

There are 10,400,600 deals where north has 13 spades and east has 13 hearts. That sounds like a lot, but when we consider that number is 0.00000000000000000002 % of all possible deals, it makes more sense. There are 84,478,098,072,866,400 deals where north has 13 spades. In both editions, the deals where north has 13 spades are all at the front of the book - they are, precisely, the deals on pages 1 to 84,478,098,072,866,400.

The "scrambled" options for these books is just a way to give you version(s) that have normal-looking hands for small values. This is a simple linear transformation applied to the list - it is not a randomnized permutation.

Places to go:

Silhouette Copyright 1996-2005. Thomas Andrews (thomas@thomasoandrews.com) .