Resources that explain or investigate artificial intelligence (AI) based approaches/strategies to the game of Mahjong

Question

While Mahjong (the actual game, not Mahjong solitare) is fairly simple in terms of basic rules and gameplay, setting objectives for the AI to transition to aim for certain end game goals seems fairly complex.

Is anyone aware of any papers, research, or other materials related to this topic?

Answer 1

I think this could be what you are looking for:

A Mah Jong-Playing Program

A masters thesis written at the Department of Information Technology

by Daniel Hellsson

with supervisors Jan Eric Larsson and Bengt Öhman

1 September, 2000

http://www.it.lth.se/janeric/mastersprojects/past/hellsson/mother.pdf

Answer 2

Have a look at AI Mahjong by Wan Jing Loh, December 11th 2009 (PDF).

In this project, I attempted to develop a viable AI Mahjong player, by building a hand evaluator that is able to accurately calculate how many tiles from victory the player is.