Learning Mahjong with AI help
A number of my dad friends play Mahjong, so I figured this would be a good time to finally take the time to learn to play. I’ve been able to use AI tools in a way that makes learning extremely efficient (at least I think so).
First, I opened a session with Claude and asked it to talk me through the rules and basic strategy. If I didn’t understand a concept well enough, I would ask it to clarify. When it came to strategy, it offered to prepare a set of drills for me to work through. Given this hand, which tile do you cut? With this opening hand, what will your overall strategy be? If I gave a wrong answer it would point out the mistake, and I sometimes pushed back with my reasoning and we would discuss the tradeoffs.
I imagine that having a private tutor is a huge help when learning anything new, and at the early stages Claude is a pretty good stand-in for a human.
Once I was comfortable with the basics, I started playing against real people online. The next tool I used was this Mahjong AI Utilities site. Some online Mahjong services let you export logs of games, and this will analyze those logs to tell you how well you played. For each move, it creates a statistical distribution of the best tile to drop, so it’s better to deviate from that as little as possible.
Sometimes I could see my error, but other times I didn’t understand why my move was bad. This is when I go back to Claude with a JSON copy of the analysis, and ask it why a particular move was better than mine. It will do its best to explain, I may or may not push back, and I usually come out with a stronger understanding of the strategy. If I have a recurring type of mistake, I can go through drills again.
I’ve found this process to be so useful in improving my play. Without this kind of guidance, it’s nearly impossible to know what I’m doing well and what I’m failing at. It’s perfectly possible to win by luck, but that means you are keeping bad habits without realizing it. I’m hopeful that this focused learning approach will help me to improve quickly.