[puluke]

After human 4NT bid described as “Quantitative invite to 6NT”, GIB incorrectly answered 5C, with “Zero or three key cards” description.

[smerriman]

No, it didn't.

You did recently play a tournament involving this auction with a completely different robot named Ben though. BBO displays GIB's alerts when playing with Ben, but Ben does not understand or use them itself, learning what bids mean from experience only, and differing from GIB in several cases, including auctions it hadn't seen often in the past.

[diana_eva]

puluke, on 2025-October-18, 11:48, said:

After human 4NT bid described as "Quantitative invite to 6NT", GIB incorrectly answered 5C, with "Zero or three key cards" description.

You were playing with our free experimental AI bridge robot, Ben, which is still under active development. Ben’s bidding explanations don’t always match its actual decisions at this stage.

As smerriman mentioned, Ben “learns” from past auctions and sometimes makes calls that aren’t easy to capture in a clear explanation. We’re actively working on improving this so that the explanations better reflect the robot’s reasoning.

See the game title or About file, if it mentions that the robot used is Ben, take the explanations with a grain of salt, they might be off occasionally, especially after long auctions.

[Joe_Old]

Don't expect Ben to play 2/1. Ben started as a "natural" bidder, systemless, that was fed umpteen hands from which it picked up parts of some 2/1 conventions. The designer claims that it was not given any bidding rules. Therefore, it now operates by its own, idiosyncratic system which bears a passing resemblance to 2/1, but lacks judgment in numerous areas (like evaluating shortness, overvaluing Queens and Jacks, control bidding, slam bidding, long suits, etc, etc, etc).

if you want to see Ben at its worst, try the Goulash.

[diana_eva]

Goulash is an experiment we launched precisely to stress Ben in extreme situations, so we can improve it, in case it matters

[thawp66]

I have played with Ben a lot and have had this situation occur multiple times. These explanations seem reasonable, so thank you for those.
However, in many if not most of them, there is no apparent, or even possible trump suit; (2N - 3C - 3D - 4N - 5X) or (1C - 1D - 2N - 4N - 5X). Is it known how Ben evaluates the number of key cards without seeming to have a suit K (or Q) to determine the response?