Ryotaro Nakamoto, Megumi Yasuo, Yoko Nishihara, Ryosuke Yamanishi, Junjie Shan: Spectator Support Systems for Mahjong Novices by Displaying Candidate Tiles for Winning, The 2024 Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, 2024

This paper proposes a system that supports watching Mahjong games for novices. Two factors make watching Mahjong games difficult for novices: it is difficult to know what combination of tiles the players are aiming for, and it is difficult to instantly grasp what tiles each player has and what tiles they discard. The system predicts and visualizes the combination of tiles at the goal that each player is aiming for and also visualizes the status of each player’s holding and discarded tiles side by side in the horizontal line. In the evaluation experiment, participants watched a Mahjong game through the proposed system. Utterances during the experiment were analyzed based on Think-aloud protocols. For comparison, we prepared a comparison system that reproduced a typical Mahjong game, had the participants watch the game similarly, and analyzed the content of their speech. Participants watched two games, and the proposed system increased utterances indicating an understanding of the game’s situation in the second time more than that in the first time. This indicates that the proposed system can help the spectator understand the game’s contents and watch the Mahjong game.