My
experience with computer-based Mahjong and Chinese culture
by Tosin Otitoju
I like to play Mahjong Titans on my computer. Not only that, I have been analyzing my play
and posting advice online for other players of Mahjong.
According to Wikipedia, Mahjong Titans
is a computer version of Mahjong Solitaire developed for use on modern Windows
machines. Mahjong
Solitaire appears to be any matching game in which the
objects that are matched are not cards, but Mahjong tiles.
What are Mahjong tiles? Traditionally used in the four-player Chinese
games of Mahjong/Mahjonng, these tiles are in groups ranging from bamboo to
winds and flowers.
Some of the tiles are one circle, two circles, with circles three to nine also. There are also bamboo tiles (sticks) from one to nine. The one bamboo has a bird on the bamboo pole,
so it can be called the bird tile. The
bird is one of the most conspicuous of the Mahjong tiles.
The other most obvious tiles in my view are the flowers. According to Wikipedia, the four types of
flowers used in Mahjong are Plums, Orchids, Chrysanthemums, and Bamboo.
Chinese love chrysanthemums, called mums. Ancient paintings and poems from China use
the mum a lot, and we also know of the interest in the mild mum tea. Did you know that the four flowers are even
more formal in their significance to Chinese art? They are called the Four Gentlemen,
and they represent a season each: chrysanthemums in autumn, winter plum, spring
orchids, and bamboo for summer.
There are some tiles that are referred to as character tiles. To be honest, I have names for them which I
use when matching them in play – dash, two dashes, three dashes, head, ‘sth’ -
something, walking man, X, and Pi, the last is still unnamed. This list of names is based on how the tiles
look to me. The tile set used in my
current version of Mahjong Titans uses a number and tally-sticks for these
character tiles. Since I can’t
understand Chinese characters, this system makes it easier for me to work with
the tiles.
Since Chinese characters are pictorial, it should be
easy for an interested person to learn the symbols that represent words and
ideas in the language. On the other
hand, there are thousands of these symbols in Chinese, so it is not so easy.
In any set of mahjong tiles, you will notice a set
of three beautiful tiles called the dragons. There are red dragons, green dragons and
black dragons. Historically, they were
red, green, and white – the white dragon being represented abstractly by a
rectangle of sorts and the red dragon looking much like a sword. However, my current version of the game has
pictures of dragons. Again, this is
easier for me as a non-Chinese-speaking player.
Clearly, the Chinese revere dragons. They are prominent at Chinese restaurants, in
Chinese New year celebrations, and everybody knows about the year of the dragon
in Chinese astrology.
Of course we know that some non-Chinese mythologies
also employ fire-breathing, scale covered, giant beasts that look like Chinese dragons. Think about the Western stories of knights
saving damsels and princesses from burning castles or prisons – the girls were
often guarded by dragons, and by ‘slaying the dragon,’ such a knight achieves a
great feat. The reward is elevation to
great respect and likely the option to marry the precious girl.
But in China, what does the dragon signify? From the times of the Zhou dynasty and the
Qin dynasty, the dragon was the symbol of the Emperor of China. Fast forward two or three thousand years, and
Wikipedia observes that “in Chinese daily language, excellent and outstanding
people are compared to the dragon.”
The four winds
are denoted North, South, East, and West.
Visually, they are dramatic and energizing. In Mahjong titans, they also have colours
associated with them and one corner of each tile is marked with a letter N, S,
E, or W for cardinal direction.
The season
tiles are autumn, winter, spring, and summer.
While there are four of most tile types, there is one of each flower
tile and one of each season tile in a Mahjong titans layout.
Mahjong Titans is included standard with most PCs,
including Windows 7. I have also played
the game on a Linux computer, so you may be able to install a version suited to
your computer’s operating system. You
can also play some versions of Mahjong solitaire online.
You don’t need to know all about the tiles to try
your hands at the game.
To play, simply match the tiles (in pairs) and they
disappear, until all the tiles have been matched. The game would not be exciting if it was so
uncomplicated. Therefore, the catch is
that an obstructed tile is not available for matching; you must first remove
the tile(s) blocking it. In some cases
you will lose the game – when you have no matches available with some tiles
left on the board.
About a year ago, I started to study my performance
of Mahjong solitaire. Using the data
stored on the software of my top five scores in each layout, I sought to
discover how difficult the game is, if I was playing well, if I could improve
my play, and such standard questions of game analysis. I have posted many of my observations on my
mathematics blog at www.xbubbler.blogspot.com
.
In the most popular configuration / layout of
Mahjong solitaire, which is called turtle,
I have improved from winning about 1 in 3 games (35%) to winning more than 2 in
3 (70%) by adopting right strategy. This
strategy is what I have called: focusing on The Blast Zone. The line
that runs horizontally through the middle of the turtle is what I have called
the blast zone. To win, one must focus
on matching as much as possible the tiles from this zone while ignoring the
tiles in other zones, relatively speaking.
This discovery goes to the heart of why the Chinese
invented these Mahjong games. Games are
an enjoyable past-time; but they are also educational tools. In ancient China, strategy was a highly
valued skill and an important part of the education of nobles.
To see this, consider popular Chinese
literature. The Art of War is a popular
read used to train soldiers and businesspersons across the world on
clear-headed problem-solving and decision-making. From the words of its ancient author Sun Tzu
in The Art of War, one can see the importance this civilization placed on good
strategy in war and leadership.
This deep respect for strategy is also clear from
Chinese war movies such as Battle
of Wits. In this delightful film, a Chinese village
was going to be attacked by a very large army, but with the arrival of a
highly-trained special agent, the villagers were able to win victory. This
was because of the application of knowledge and strategy.
Wars may not always be won by brute force, but by
application of force at the weakest point.
Conversely, in Mahjong titans, the game is won by applying the maximum force
at the zone of most resistance. Both
examples show that power without wisdom can only result in failure.
I became very interested in the Chinese war film
genre after watching Red
Cliff a few years ago.
It was a film utterly concerned with battle-planning based on careful
consideration of own resources, enemy resources, and even the weather, terrain,
and other aspects of the physical and social environment.
One of the actors in Red Cliff that I have enjoyed
watching subsequently is Takeshi
Kaneshiro. Clearly,
this is not a Chinese name. It turns out
that this handsome actor is part-Japanese.
When I consider the success of this actor in portraying historical and
iconic Chinese characters, what comes to my mind is the similarity between
Chinese and Japanese people and the irony of war between brothers – that war so
often arises between those most closely related.
Consider the shared Confucian philosophy between
China and Japan. Consider too, the
shared genetics that make both peoples appear quite alike. The written forms of their languages share a
similar appearance. And yet, between
both countries is a bloody history and tense diplomatic relations. Perhaps China and Japan could consider shared
cultural pursuits? In the film industry
at least, it seems that these two great nations are friendly and united.
When I was an engineering student in a top
technology institute in America, I noticed that people from Hong Kong, from the
Chinese mainland, from Taiwan, Korea, and Japan sometimes considered themselves
to have important differences. Over time
however, their similar challenges as immigrants, coupled with their shared
values – stoic hardwork, devotion to study, to family, and to privacy – meant
that they forged good friendships. So
while I saw first-hand some of the inherited hostilities between various East
Asian people, happily I also saw many cross-boundary friendships.
Students from China are successful at entering, and
then graduating from, such elite programs of study. Someone joked that having learned thousands
of characters as children to gain basic language literacy, they are well prepared
for the rigours of advanced mathematics, science, and engineering. More likely, it is their work ethic, and
their habit of co-operating that results in their continued high performance.
China is known for the invention of printing, paper,
gunpowder, and the compass – canonized as the Four Great
Inventions. Chinese
ingenuity continues into the present day.
My sister who loves fashion enjoyed shopping in China where factories
currently produce excess amounts of clothing for the world’s consumption. In fact, China is currently the manufacturing
center of the world. Through higher
education also, Chinese citizens have been heavily involved in the high-tech
industries.
Although it is clear that China can do research and
development and manufacturing, few understand the role of Chinese culture in
recreational mathematics. I am very glad
to be able to introduce people to the joy of maths and strategy using Mahjong
solitaire. Furthermore, my published
hints on playing the game have yielded around 800 visits to my blog site, or 1
in 4 visits to the blog, in the past twelve months. This shows that the world is interested in
this little Chinese game.
Should you choose to play Mahjong titans, my
preliminary findings show that the easiest
layouts (assuming random matching without a clear strategy)
are Cat and Crab. The other four styles
– Spider, Fortress, Dragon, and Turtle – can be won almost exclusively
when your strategy is correct. To win
these, you should understand the lines of dependency in the layouts, and attack
at the thickest points. This makes the
difference between winning and losing these games. My blog shows you such strategies.
Once you have learned to win, your next concern may
be raising your score. On my blog www.xbubbler.blogspot.com
, I share a hint from the scoring rules of traditional Mahjong: you can raise
your score by matching two identical pairs (the same group of tiles) at
once. This appears to be relevant for
Mahjong Titans, since I have steadily raised my score using this hint. Now, I have also read at a different site
about a scoring
system that values some tiles (Season, Flower, Dragon)
more highly than the common tiles. This
is interesting. I look forward to trying
the game with this new knowledge and recording/analyzing my results.
Having watched an interesting documentary video clip
about the history
of Mahjong, I also look forward to trying the traditional Mahjong
game, the version popular throughout East Asia and known in China for
centuries. Someday, I hope to enjoy
other aspects of Chinese culture: the architecture and archaeology, music and
theater, and certainly the food.
References:
I wrote this essay in September 2012 for a Chinese tourism outreach effort called "Window of Shanghai." Find my latest comments on playing Mahjong Titans here.
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