Artificial Intelligence: Smart bridge playing program

Title:

Bridge Convention Storing Computer Program, with Artificial Intelligence

Objective:

The objective of this research would be to design a computer program that 
stores and reenacts various bridge (the card game) bidding systems.

Justification:

This program would be a useful tool to anyone analyzing bridge hands, and 
would show what technically should be bid in each situation. It would also 
facilitate the making of more realistic and diverse bridge simulation programs, 
which often are very lacking in the bidding aspect of the game.

Another reason for doing this project would be to give myself experience in 
making a large, scalable, program using artificial intelligence. While I think my 
project idea is very good, I am open to pursuing another project involving 
artificial intelligence if I think of one that is more worthwhile or stimulating 
than this one.

Description:

The goal of this project is to design a computer program that stores bridge 
bidding systems and can bid hands.
This project is both simple yet incredibly difficult. I want to allow the user to 
input what all opening bids mean, then what all responses mean, then what 
all responses to responses mean, etc. This branching out concept is simple 
enough, but designing it so the user can make generalizations and fully 
describe the situation in which you would make each bid would be quite 
complex. I want the user to be able to distinguish majors from minors, 
artificial bids from natural ones, and part-score contracts from game among 
other things. Also, a risk factor on each bid would optimally need to be added 
in order to allow for bidding under different scoring conditions. Additionally, 
accounting for situations in which both partnerships bid would add yet 
another layer of complexity to the branching system.
I want to design the program so that the bidding systems can be saved and 
then used by the same or possibly by a partner program to simulate 
computer bidding of hands. Allowing for hands to be entered or randomly 
dealt would be a challenge there. Also, having the bidding system saved 
and viewed is one thing, making the computer interpret it and act upon it 
is quite another.

Limitations:

There are no budget, space, or safety concerns for this project. 
Concerning time, this project probably could take a long time to finish or it 
could go by quickly. It would just depend upon how smoothly the 
programming went, how good the initial design was, and how many 
features were included in the final product. Designing and building a 
program that could store bids in text form for later viewing would not be 
that difficult. However making the bids have uniform qualities and making 
an artificial intelligence to understand them would be quite a challenge.