Mahjax: New JAX-based Mahjong AI Simulator Enables Large-Scale RL Research
Researchers have introduced Mahjax, a GPU-accelerated Mahjong simulator built in JAX, designed to drive large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) from scratch in complex games with imperfect information.

What happened?
A new research paper presents Mahjax, a fully vectorised Riichi Mahjong environment implemented in JAX. The objective is to enable large-scale parallelisation of rollouts on graphics cards (GPUs). The simulator is intended for reinforcement learning research and also includes a visualisation tool for debugging and interacting with trained AI agents.
Key facts
| Simulatornamn | Mahjax |
|---|---|
| Ramverk | JAX |
| Spel | Riichi Mahjong |
| Maximal genomströmning | 2 miljoner rollouts/s |
| Klassificering | cs.AI (Artificiell Intelligens) |
”Riichi Mahjong is a multi-player, imperfect-information game characterized by stochasticity and high-dimensional state spaces. These attributes present a unique combination of challenges that mirror complex real-world decision-making problems in reinforcement learning.”
”To facilitate such research, we introduce Mahjax, a fully vectorized Riichi Mahjong environment implemented in JAX to enable large-scale rollout parallelization on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).”
”Experimental results demonstrate that Mahjax achieves throughputs of up to 2 million”
Why it matters
Mahjong is a multi-player game featuring incomplete information, stochasticity, and high-dimensional state spaces. These characteristics represent a challenging combination similar to complex decision-making problems in the real world. By enabling training from scratch, similar to AlphaZero, Mahjax can contribute to more generally applicable AI development beyond mere supervised learning from human game logs.
Who is affected?
Researchers and developers within artificial intelligence, particularly those working with reinforcement learning and complex game environments with imperfect information, are directly affected. Those interested in JAX-based applications and high-performance GPU computing for AI research are also concerned.
What else you should know
Mahjax achieves a throughput of up to 2 million rollouts per second, underlining its capability to handle large-scale training efficiently.
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