Please take the time to read and comment on our article that discussed the randomness of the Mahjong Time game. Please include your Mahjong Time username in your responses. Thank you!
Click here to view the article.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Please comment on our article on randomness!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I am new to MJT, register just before end of the year and have been playing about 20-30 games, mostly RCR.
As I understand, there several ramdomness factors that easily make the game random
1) Generating the wall
2) The dices
3) Players position
4) Players decision to pung/chow
5) Players choice of discards
1-3 effect the players starting hand when 4-5 can shift the flow of the game.
Since MJT did not expose how the random system work and I cannot see how the cards actually distributed, it is difficult to give a detail comment on the system.
However, as far as I can see, I think the starting hand distribution is random quite well. I had anything from 6 cards to ready and ready by the first draw, usually probably around 4. Pure suit to even distributed. Had both bad hand streak and good hand streak.
Since most of my games were RCR, it possible to tell if other players get a good start hand or good draw by their 'ready' announcement. Often that high rating players can go to ready state quite fast but that didn't mean they always have better luck than other. Beside that, it's not mean they get a sure win from there.
If I have to say about players skill, I believe a skill players can make a good management on their hands like maximize their waiting or read the game flow to see what cards they may draw. Thus increase their chance of completing the hand.
I would just like to debate a point of semantics. In the article it states:
"If a majority of players believe the tiles are not always distributed randomly and that they are given "bad tiles", then logically it cannot be the case."
Making this statement as if it falls within the boundries of logical determination is actually very inaccurate. Speaking in terms of logic, purely logic, one could postulate that if a MAJORITY of MJT users believe that the RNG algorithim results in biased play, and ONLY if that same majority consistently believes such, that there is a predominant chance that there IS a bias. This, however, does not in any way imply or evidence any unfairness in the system's math. This is because machines simply cannot, under any circumstances, truly develop purely random number arrays.
I don't think that the RNG results in any bias per say, but I do believe that the system that shuffles the tiles needs a little bit of work. I do not know how the wall is built by MJT's software, and so I can only speculate, but quite often it seems to result in a "chunky" shuffle.
Overall though, I just want to say; "Well done." By far the best "mahjong community" development in the industry.
thanks
Fury10
member since 12/15/2009
Post a Comment