Title
Monte-Carlo Simulation for Mahjong
Abstract
Mahjong is a four-player, stochastic, imperfect information game. This paper focuses on the Taiwanese variant of Mahjong, whose complexity is higher than that of Go. We design a strong anytime Monte-Carlo-based Taiwanese Mahjong program. First, we adopt the flat Monte Carlo to calculate the win rates of all afterstates/actions such as discarding each tile. Then, we propose a heuristic method, which we incorporate into flat Monte Carlo to obtain the accurate tile to be discarded. As an anytime algorithm, we can stop simulations and return the current best move at any time. In addition, we prune bad actions to increase accuracy and efficiency. Our program, SIMCAT, won the championship in the Mahjong tournaments in Computer Olympiad 2020 and TAAI 2019/2020.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.6688/JISE.202207_38(4).0005
JOURNAL OF INFORMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Monte-Carlo simulation, discard-twice method, imperfect information game, Mahjong, progressive pruning
Journal
38
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1016-2364
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jr-Chang Chen100.68
Shih-Chieh Tang200.34
I-Chen Wu320855.03