Authors:
Shih-Chieh Tang
1
;
Jr-Chang Chen
2
and
I-Chen Wu
3
;
1
Affiliations:
1
Department of Computer Science, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
;
2
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taipei University, New Taipei City, Taiwan
;
3
Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
Keyword(s):
Mahjong, Stochastic Board Game, Skill Assessment.
Abstract:
Mahjong, a tile-based game, is a complex four-player stochastic game of imperfect information involving both strategy and luck. Due to its inherent randomness, accurately assessing the strength of players requires a large number of games, which is time-consuming. This randomness primarily originates from two factors: (1) the initial arrangement of the wall and (2) tile stealing by players. Both affect the tiles players draw and thus influence game outcomes. To address the effect of these factors, especially the randomness introduced by stealing, we propose a novel method, called the stable draw wall (abbr. SDW). The SDW partitions the original wall into individual sub-walls for each player, ensuring that the tile drawing order of each player remains consistent and does not change by stealing from any player. The experimental results showed that when playing a small number of games, the win rate of a player by using the SDW is more accurate than by using the original wall. Consequentl
y, our proposed method significantly mitigates the randomness effect caused by changing the order of draws, allowing a more reliable evaluation of the strength of players, which should focus on strategic decision making.
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