Estimating the purpose of discard in mahjong to support learning for beginners

Abstract

It is always difficult for beginners to learn rules of a new game. A game is classified depending on various aspects, for instance, one with perfect or imperfect information. Because of developing the computer program for a game with perfect information, it is significant to focus on a game with imperfect information as the main target for computational research. Especially, Mahjong is one of popular games with imperfect information. From the aspect of the game informatics, we focus on providing a support system for human players. In order to support mahjong beginners, we constructed a system that displays hints and estimates the players’ purpose of discard based on the support vector machine.