I did almost the same thing about 12 years ago when CPU cycles and RAM
were more expensive.

I created a table that returned a two values, one if the hand was not
suited and one if it was suited. If the suited value was non-zero
(meaning the hand could be suited and would improve in value if
suited) then it was tested if it was suited or not.

The good part of this approach is the saved cycles when not needed.
The bad part is some hands took longer to evaluate.

Once I got it working I used it for a couple of hand evaluator ideas,
thought about extending it for 7-card hands where the memory
considerations got much larger, then lost interest as I had other
things going on taking my "free" time, like changing diapers on my
then baby girl (now in 7th grade).

I wish I could add to the topic some but I can add that this is the
path I thought to explore as well so I wish you good luck and look
forward to some results.


On 1/4/07, Darse Billings <darse@...> wrote:
>
> Quite some time ago, "Cactus Kev" created a webpage about
> his fast 5-card hand eval:
>
> http://www.suffecool.net/poker/evaluator.html
>
> It exploits the equivalence classes of poker hands, where
> there are only 7462 distinct hand values. His indexing
> function is primitive, but the potential for very fast
> table-based evaluators is clear. The bottleneck is now
> in computing the hash index, and the 2+2 thread offers
> some clever tricks to do that in under 50 cycles per hand.
>
> - Darse.
>
>
> On 3-Jan-07, at 8:28 PM, Michael Maurer wrote:
>
> > There is a fascinating thread on 2+2 about building the next
> > generation of poker hand evaluators. Several posters have reported
> > 7-card hand eval rates well over 100M hands per second. The
> > approaches use "a lot" of memory, but nothing you would notice on your
> > desktop box.
> >
> > The thread is here:
> > http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Number=8648777&fpart=all
> >
> > -Michael M
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Yahoo! Groups Links
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>