[kuroguro]

Reminds me of the 2+2 poker hand evaluator - they basically built an insanely fast giant lookup table that fit in ~100megs of ram IIRC.

The main idea was to do monte-carlo simulations and give you your odds of winning at any point in the game by dealing random cards for the unknowns.

Interesting read on that and other evaluators as well:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130116102452/http://www.codingt...

[mypalmike]

With a fast evaluator you generally don't need to do Monte Carlo approximation - you can just brute force all combinations.