Adapting Rules of Official International Mahjong for Online Players

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the fairness issues of online international Mahjong using AI self-play data, proposing rule modifications like compensatory points to balance first-mover advantage for online play.

Contribution

It introduces data-driven rule adaptations for online Mahjong, addressing fairness and convenience issues specific to online gameplay environments.

Findings

First-mover advantage identified through AI self-play analysis

Proposed compensatory points improve game fairness online

Online implementation demonstrates practical applicability

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.