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Adapting Rules of Official International Mahjong for Online Players

Chucai Wang, Lingfeng Li, Yunlong Lu, Wenxin Li

TL;DR

Official International Mahjong exhibits fairness challenges in online single-round play due to first-mover bias. The study leverages self-play data from a world-champion AI and Botzone/A.I. competition data to quantify imbalance and test rule changes. It introduces two key adaptations—a compensatory first-mover mechanism and frequency-aware subgoal scoring adjustments—and implements an online version, MahjongRevised. This data-driven approach demonstrates a viable pathway to adapt traditional, multi-round rules for online environments and lays groundwork for further balance-oriented research in online Mahjong.

Abstract

As one of the worldwide spread traditional game, Official International Mahjong can be played and promoted online through remote devices instead of requiring face-to-face interaction. However, online players have fragmented playtime and unfixed combination of opponents in contrary to offline players who have fixed opponents for multiple rounds of play. Therefore, the rules designed for offline players need to be modified to ensure the fairness of online single-round play. Specifically, We employ a world champion AI to engage in self-play competitions and conduct statistical data analysis. Our study reveals the first-mover advantage and issues in the subgoal scoring settings. Based on our findings, we propose rule adaptations to make the game more suitable for the online environment, such as introducing compensatory points for the first-mover advantage and refining the scores of subgoals for different tile patterns. Compared with the traditional method of rotating positions over multiple rounds to balance first-mover advantage, our compensatory points mechanism in each round is more convenient for online players. Furthermore, we implement the revised Mahjong game online, which is open for online players. This work is an initial attempt to use data from AI systems to evaluate Official Internatinoal Mahjong's game balance and develop a revised version of the traditional game better adapted for online players.

Adapting Rules of Official International Mahjong for Online Players

TL;DR

Official International Mahjong exhibits fairness challenges in online single-round play due to first-mover bias. The study leverages self-play data from a world-champion AI and Botzone/A.I. competition data to quantify imbalance and test rule changes. It introduces two key adaptations—a compensatory first-mover mechanism and frequency-aware subgoal scoring adjustments—and implements an online version, MahjongRevised. This data-driven approach demonstrates a viable pathway to adapt traditional, multi-round rules for online environments and lays groundwork for further balance-oriented research in online Mahjong.

Abstract

As one of the worldwide spread traditional game, Official International Mahjong can be played and promoted online through remote devices instead of requiring face-to-face interaction. However, online players have fragmented playtime and unfixed combination of opponents in contrary to offline players who have fixed opponents for multiple rounds of play. Therefore, the rules designed for offline players need to be modified to ensure the fairness of online single-round play. Specifically, We employ a world champion AI to engage in self-play competitions and conduct statistical data analysis. Our study reveals the first-mover advantage and issues in the subgoal scoring settings. Based on our findings, we propose rule adaptations to make the game more suitable for the online environment, such as introducing compensatory points for the first-mover advantage and refining the scores of subgoals for different tile patterns. Compared with the traditional method of rotating positions over multiple rounds to balance first-mover advantage, our compensatory points mechanism in each round is more convenient for online players. Furthermore, we implement the revised Mahjong game online, which is open for online players. This work is an initial attempt to use data from AI systems to evaluate Official Internatinoal Mahjong's game balance and develop a revised version of the traditional game better adapted for online players.
Paper Structure (13 sections, 5 figures, 8 tables, 3 algorithms)

This paper contains 13 sections, 5 figures, 8 tables, 3 algorithms.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Online Game
  4. AI for Game Balance
  5. Analysis of Mahjong Rules
  6. Mahjong AI
  7. Background
  8. Official International Mahjong
  9. IJCAI Mahjong AI competition
  10. Rule Adaptments
  11. First-Mover Advantage
  12. Scores of tile patterns as subgoals
  13. Conclusions

Figures (5)

  • Figure 1: A common scoring pattern called "Mixed Triple Chow", including three same consecutive number sequences in all three suits.
  • Figure 2: The Mahjong environment on Botzone.
  • Figure 3: Average winning rates in the four positions
  • Figure 4: Average scores in the four positions
  • Figure 5: The number of occurrence of each scoring pattern in 65,536 self-play games from the champion AI.