Chess Engines as Compared to Bridge Engines

I play a lot of duplicate bridge on the internet. Often I will play with a bridge playing robot as my partner. The robot does not play very well by my standards but still better than 99% of most humans.

Chess engines have been developed which are at least as strong as the strongest human player.  Chess is far more complicated than duplicate bridge.

Yet, the strongest bridge playing robot I have played with was only equivalent in strength to a class A player in chess.

For those who may know something about this subject--Why is it that there has never been a duplicate bridge engine that is even to the master level in chess? 

First: Hello, fellow Bridgie! Good to see another one of us in the Chess world.

Second: 2 reasons - 1) While Chess is a Complete Information game, Bridge is one of Incomplete Information, and therefore the approach to solving is actually more complicated than Chess. For an engine, Chess is complex, but calculable. Bridge needs things like Monte Carlo modeling and such. It may even benefit from a Neural Net approach like they did with great success in Backgammon. 2) There is much deeper interest in Chess from the Math and Computer Science worlds and much wider interest in players. Far many more people play Chess vs. Bridge. People = interest = money = better programs.

Oh, and the Bridge programs are getting really good at cardplay, but still suck at bidding. But that's another topic for somewhere else...

I may or may not know.  But I have to guess it's simply because of money.  Make it profitable and they'll have world class bridge playing robots who will sit across from you at a table and make small talk while you play :p

I am not so sure that there are more people who are active chess players than who are active bridge players. 

Grobzilla, you really answered my question well.

I play on Bridgebase and a lot of players on line. I would be interested in the statistics as to how many play chess and how many play bridge.

There is one thing about bridge that I will never understand. Players make the same mistakes over and over and over again and never seem to learn from their mistakes.  At least in chess some players learn from their mistakes...