Japanese Mahjong Japanese Mahjong Japanese Mahjong (Japanese: 麻雀, 麻将 or マージャン; "mājan"), also known as Rīchi Mahjong, is a variation of mahjong. While the basic rules to the game are retained, the variation features a unique set of rules such as "rīchi" and the use of "dora". The main mahjong article contains general terms, but only English and Japanese terms are used here. Terms like "chow," "pung," and "kong" are not used in this variation, yet their functions are still used. Instead, they are referred to in Japanese as "chī", "pon", and "kan". In 1924, a soldier named Saburo Hirayama brought the
Chow–Liu tree dependency tree, as shown in the figure. The Chow–Liu algorithm (below) determines which conditional probabilities are to be used in the product approximation. In general, unless there are no third-order or higher-order interactions, the Chow–Liu approximation is indeed an "approximation", and cannot capture the complete structure of the original distribution. provides a modern analysis of the Chow–Liu tree as a Bayesian network. Chow and Liu show how to select second-order terms for the product approximation so that, among all such second-order approximations (first-order dependency trees), the constructed approximation formula_4 has the minimum Kullback–Leibler distance to the actual distribution formula_5, and