Tenhou Support Receives Bot Complaints

[tsuno00]

I am Tsunoda, the developer and operator of the online competitive Mahjong game Tenhou.

I believe that many people are making good use of this library for their research and self-improvement. However, there are also many bots with bad manners, and I find it necessary to deal with complaints about bots on a daily basis.

I think it's great to develop excellent AI and bots "personally". However, could you make it so that the method for accessing Tenhou requires overcoming a significantly high hurdle?

At Tenhou, we accept AI and bots from research institutions where sponsorship from large corporations is expected. If you need to create a bot for Tenhou, I kindly ask you to contact Tenhou first.

Contact: support@c-egg.com

Thank you for your cooperation.

[Nihisil]

Hello @tsuno00! Thank you for reaching out.

This bot is primarily utilized within our community as a substitute player for online tournaments, greatly improving the organizers' quality of life.

Although it is not particularly strong and operates at a 3d-4d level (it achieved 4 dan and R1800+ for 685 games in 一般), it is impractical to use this bot for climbing ranks on tenhou.net. It is likely that people are employing other bots for that purpose.

However, could you make it so that the method for accessing Tenhou requires overcoming a significantly high hurdle?

I am unsure of how this can be achieved, as anyone with basic computer science knowledge and a few spare hours can debug the protocol and create their own connection wrapper.

I will definitely update the bot's documentation to discourage people from using it for ranking purposes.

What do you think about that?

[tsuno00]

I believe the notation to 'not connect for ranking purposes' aligns partially with our intention. For instance, it may be barely acceptable if AI is used 'secretively' in private rooms or personal tournaments as a hobby.

However, due to the nature of the site, Tenhou finds it challenging to 'publicly' allow connections from bots/AIs, which is a fundamental issue. So, if there are any details related to Tenhou's servers included, please remove them.

How about making it so that only those who have received connection approval from Tenhou's support can enter the server information when connecting to Tenhou?

[Nihisil]

I've taken out the code that's related to tenhou.net and archived the repository because there are no plans for further development on this project. Sorry if this caused any issues for tenhou.net.