[bachfan]

[ QUOTE ]

Interesting behaviour. I looked at the code, and it seems that my method for selecting monte carlo hands is fairly inefficient. For those who are interested, in the monte carlo code I draw cards from an infinite deck for all the hands and then discard scenarios where two hands hold duplicate cards. Of course, when all the hands are drawn from a narrow distribution, this happens far too often.


[/ QUOTE ]

This is exactly the problem I was referring to a few posts back (sounds like we are taking the same approach here). I found some tricks for making things a bit faster in various cases, but I have yet to find a fast algorithm that generates the hands with the correct probability in these kinds of cases. I described the problem to my brother (a math professor at a major university), and the best he could come up with was "it sounds hard." [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Cheers,
bachfan