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A new approach to compute deficiency number of Mahjong configurations

2022; Elsevier BV; Volume: 43; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.entcom.2022.100509

1875-953X

Qichao Wang, Yang Zhou, Dongyi Zhu, Yongming Li,

Gambling Behavior and Treatments

• An efficient algorithmic approach to compute deficiency number of Mahjong configuration is designed, i.e., the number of tiles the player needs to change minimally for the winning. • The algorithm is implemented by using the programming language Python, and its performance is measured through more than 1.2 million test cases without duplication. • The algorithm can deal with each test case within one fiftieth of a second, and the average number of computation branches is only 7.784. Mahjong is a traditional Chinese tile-based game with long history, and now it is world-widely played in many different countries. An important issue on Mahjong topic is how many tiles the player needs to change minimally for the winning, i.e., the so-called deficiency number , which plays a significant role in AI development for Mahjong game. However, deficiency number cannot be easily computed due to a large amount of possible combinations of tiles. In this work, we propose an efficient algorithmic approach to compute the deficiency number of the tiles in players’ hands with the assistance of the programming language Python . In order to evaluate the performance of the approach, we established more than 1.2 million test cases for various deficiency numbers. Finally, the experimental results show the efficiency of our approach.