MGP said:
You don't need to redo the dealer probs - I described this earlier. You just need to compare the different totals. In your example you'd compare to totals of 17, 13 an 9.
I think we may be talking slightly at cross purposes.
The different totals are of course taken care of. The whole point of the data strutcure I am refering to is to allow for this re-use in different contexts.
I'm looking at the code, trying to discern what the intended algorithm is, in what way it performs an approximation, and how/whether it could be modified so as to be exact.
This could be one of those "If I was going there, I wouldn't start from here." situations; starting from scratch might be the better option. I don't know.
(And in truth it's not something I'm going to be working on any time soon. But it's helpful to pursue this discussion now, for future reference, while we have your attention.
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To continue your trip down memory lane, I found the 'bringing it all together' post you mentioned - (Dead link: http://www.bjmath.com/bin-cgi/bjmath.pl?read=4937)
There's a lot in there I don't follow. But from what I've so far read both here and at bjmath, it seems that you (and k_c) take an approach in which each of n split hands is evaluated separately, meaning the later hands have fewer possible resplits available to them and also have to account for the removal of more pair cards.
Eric, on the other hand, has gone down the path of treating all n split hands as being equivalent. His code would appear to adopt the definition of the EV from repeated splitting given at the start of chapter 11 of TOBJ by Griffin. (But does not use the extrapolation method that Griffin then goes on to describe.)
So it's in that context that it seems to me redoing the dealer probabilities would be necessary, as described in Griffin's example.
Griffin said:
[...] will require an intricate readjustment of probabilities for drawing to both the player's and dealer's hands, since the first card on any of the other split eights is known to be a non-eight.
Also, thinking about it some more, I'm not sure that the step Eric takes to get the conditional EV of a split hand (conditioned on not drawing a further pair) makes much sense.
He just divides the EV by 'pNoPair' as a final step, but surely he ought instead to not draw the pair card in the first place, limiting which hands are considered. I appreciate that may not make much sense if you are not looking at the code, but it may be of help to Mango (and to me when I look back at this in a couple of years time.
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