In 1997, the IBM’s Deep Blue came out in the time full of loyalty and filial piety. At that time, the Deep Blue defeated theWorldChess Championship Garry Kasparov, which helped the Blue Giant regain the glory of the past and made it a story in the development of the artificial intelligence.

Today, China raises it as anational strategy to develop the robot industry, for there should be a unique competition with the brand of Chinese culture. And this kind of competition canhelp to investigate the robot development across the world and lead all therobot businesses in the world to compete in accordance with the rules of thegame set by China.

It may be the best way to test theability of robot when it plays the Mahjong with other three players, robot orhuman. It is not a joke because almost all the robotics research areas will beinvolved when the robot plays Mahjong with people, and this kind of activitycan be compared with the Olympics in this area. Let’s deduce gradually next.

The game premise is that three Mahjong robots play the Mahjong with one human player in the most commonly used Mahjong parlor with automatic Mahjong table. And all the robots can only be powered by the rechargeable batteries and no charge for them in the process of playing Mahjong. After every four turns, when the human players have a rest, the robot players can be charged for 5 minutes. This can inspect the design capacity for physical dimension (That’s because it is hard for the robot to sit down at the table if it’s too big.), the endurance of the charge (human players may play twelve or sixteen turns continuously), and the capacity for instant charge (for justice, human players have only 5 minutes for rest).

Throwing the dice, recognizing the points and positioning and dealing cards can all reflect the flexibility of robots’ mechanical hands, and the ability of the robots to recognize the dice, to convey and put accurately.

Drawing cards and playing cards can also reflect the pattern recognition and spatial perception ability of the robots for they are not allowed to make mistakes. For example, start from a wrong player. And the cards should also be placed in a clearing.

Facing the complex dimension of 144 pieces of cards, to Chow（“Chi Pai”） or not, Pung（“Peng Pai”） or not, Kong (“Gang Pai”) or not, and Hu（Winning, or going Mahjong）or not, this is a question. Thus, it is more difficult than World Chess, the Four war chess and the Go. The games played by the past Deep Blue and the present Watson were so easy as well as the children’s games. The robot must have some consummate skills if it wants to transcend the human player in Mahjong.

How to keep a close look at the cards of the opponent on the left and how to obstruct the opponent on the right need the robot to decide in a real time, to plan dynamically and to learn incrementally.

Certainly, it is impossible to play cards without chatting with each other. Playing with talking is very common. To interact with human players with the help of real-time voice, the Siri of Apple, Microsoft Wheatgrass, IFLYEK, and Duer etc. the robot must cram of some veritable Mahjong terminologies.

It would be better if the speech synthesis can assist the robot to imitate Mr. Zhao Zhongxiang who is the hero in middle and old age women’s heart when play the Mahjong.

In addition, the robot must have a strong ability of self-studying, for there are hundreds of rules for Mahjong and the robot must master those rules as quickly as possible.

Postscript:

Hello, I am Zhu Zongxiao, the creator of the Legion of Filial Piety, whose philosophy is to help children work contentedly and at the same time, to help their parents out. As the famous saying goes “Everyone should treat others’ parents as his.” We should try our best to provide a both happy and healthy sunset life for the old worldwide, with the assistance of science and technology products, information technology, humanistic concerns and the commodity circulation.

The reason why I was occurred by the idea to create a robot for Mahjong is because every time my parents and I want to play Mahjong together, there is always a lack of one player. But my wife does not want to learn it at all. Anyhow, I do not want to teach my eight-year old son to play the game. Similarly, other families must need the robot for Mahjong under the same condition. In the future, robots should be prepared in case of only three players, one short, in every Mahjong parlor.

More importantly, we can encourage the robot businesses forcefully and openly to compete with each other with their true power, such as the ABB and SIEMENS for transmission, GOOGLE and IBM for artificial intelligence, and INTEL and MICROSOFT for platforms and so on. In this way, some of the weak robot businesses both nationally and internationally will be knocked out. In the future, as a precondition, any company who wants to do robot business must send his robot to play the Mahjong with us in a common Mahjong parlor first.