Gambit: Software Tools for Game Theory

Gambit is a library of game theory software and tools for the construction and analysis of finite extensive and strategic games. Gambit is designed to be portable across platforms, and runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

The Gambit Project provides:

• A graphical user interface, based upon the wxWidgets library, providing a common interface with native look-and-feel across platforms.
• A library of C++ source code for representing games, suitable for use in other applications.
• A Python API for scripting applications.
• A new browser-based user interface, the Game Theory Explorer (GTE), for the input of extensive and strategic games. For further details see https://github.com/gambitproject/gte/wiki/_pages

Using and citing Gambit

Gambit is Free/Open Source software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

We hope you will find Gambit useful for both teaching and research applications. If you do use Gambit in a class, or in a paper, we would like to hear about it. We are especially interested in finding out what you like about Gambit, and where you think improvements could be made.

If you are citing Gambit in a paper, we suggest a citation of the form:

McKelvey, Richard D., McLennan, Andrew M., and Turocy, Theodore L. (2010). Gambit: Software Tools for Game Theory, Version 0.2010.09.01. http://www.gambit-project.org.

Replace the version number and year as appropriate if you use a different release.

Table of Contents

• An Overview of Gambit
  • What is Gambit?
  • A brief history of Gambit
  • Key features of Gambit
  • Limitations of Gambit
  • Developers
  • Downloading Gambit
  • Community
  • Bug reports and inquiries
• The graphical interface
  • Getting started: Tutorials
  • General concepts
  • Extensive games
  • Strategic games
  • Investigating dominated strategies and actions
  • Computing Nash equilibria
  • Computing quantal response equilibria
  • Printing and exporting games
• Command-line tools
  • gambit-enumpure: Enumerate pure-strategy equilibria of a game
  • gambit-enumpoly: Compute equilibria of a game using polynomial systems of equations
  • gambit-enummixed: Enumerate equilibria in a two-player game
  • gambit-gnm: Compute Nash equilibria in a strategic game using a global Newton method
  • gambit-ipa: Compute Nash equilibria in a strategic game using iterated polymatrix approximation
  • gambit-lcp: Compute equilibria in a two-player game via linear complementarity
  • gambit-lp: Compute equilibria in a two-player constant-sum game via linear programming
  • gambit-liap: Compute Nash equilibria using function minimization
  • gambit-simpdiv: Compute equilibria via simplicial subdivision
  • gambit-logit: Compute quantal response equilbria
• Sample games
• For contributors: Ideas and suggestions for Gambit-related projects
  • Interfacing GTE with equilibrium-finding modules
  • Improving the GTE graphical interface
  • Porting GTE to JavaScript
  • Enhancing the web interface with online storage of games
  • Refactor and update game representation library
  • Integrate Action Graph Games support into main Gambit distribution
  • Implementing algorithms for finding equilibria in games
• For developers: Building Gambit from source
  • General information
  • Building from git repository
  • Supported compilers
  • For 64-bit users
  • For Windows users
  • For OS X users
  • The graphical interface and wxWidgets
• Game representation formats
  • Conventions common to all file formats
  • The extensive game (.efg) file format
  • The strategic game (.nfg) file format, payoff version
  • The strategic game (.nfg) file format, outcome version
• Python interface to Gambit library
  • A tutorial introduction
  • Computing Nash equilibria
  • Hashing and game objects
  • API documentation
• Bibliography
  • Articles on computation of Nash equilibria
  • General game theory articles and texts
  • Textbooks and general reference