About Gambit

Gambit traces its origins to programs written to analyze games in the mid-1980s by Richard McKelvey at the California Institute of Technology. Originally written in BASIC, with a simple graphical interface, it was ported to C and the Borland Graphics Interface around 1990 with the help of Bruce Bell, and was distributed publicly for the first time as version 0.13 in 1991 and 1992. The earliest mention of Gambit in a journal article is in Wilson, Robert (1992), Computing simply stable equilibria, Econometrica 60(5): 1039-1070.

Gambit logo (1990s-2025)

Gambit was developed into a full-fledged package between 1994 and 1996, supported by a US National Science Foundation grant to McKelvey and Andrew McLennan (then at University of Minnesota), with Theodore Turocy joining the project in 1993 as principal developer. Gambit was re-written in C++, and became fully cross-platform, with a graphical interface based on wxWidgets (called wxWindows at the time), and a custom scripting language (since superseded by the PyGambit Python package).

Version 0.94 of Gambit was released in the late summer of 1994, version 0.96 followed in 1999, and version 0.97 in 2002. Many students at Caltech and Minnesota made contributions programming, testing, and/or documenting Gambit. These include, alphabetically, Anand Chelian, Matthew Derer, Nelson Escobar, Ben Freeman, Eugene Grayver (graphical interface), Todd Kaplan, Geoff Matters, Brian Trotter, Michael Vanier, Roberto Weber, and Gary Wu (command language).

Bernhard von Stengel (London School of Economics) has made significant contributions in the implementation of the sequence form methods for two-player extensive games, and for contributing his “clique” code for identification of equilibrium components in two-player strategic games.

Gambit has participated in Google Summer of Code in 2011 and 2012. Early versions of what is now PyGambit were developed with GSoC support through the projects of Alessandro Andrioni and Stephen Kunath.

Gambit has also supported the development of Game Theory Explorer (GTE), which allows users to create extensive- and strategic-form games in a web browser, and to solve two-player versions of these games. GTE was started by Bernhard von Stengel and his soon-to-be PhD student Rahul Savani in summer 2001. Development for the GTE project was financially supported by STICERD research grants and an LSE Impact Case Study Fund from the London School of Economics, and by the Google Summer of Code 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016 as part of Gambit. Major contributions to earlier versions of GTE were made by Mark Egesdal, Alfonso Gomez-Jordana, Martin Prause, Karen Bletzer, and Amelie Heliou. The current version of GTE was developed by Martin Antonov with financial support from the LSE Impact Case Study Fund (2018-2020).

Gambit’s support for Action Graph Games was contributed by Navin Bhat, Albert Jiang, Kevin Leyton-Brown, and David Thompson, with funding support provided by a University Graduate Fellowship of the University of British Columbia, the NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship, and a Google Research Award to Leyton-Brown.

The project has been led by Turocy since 2002, with Rahul Savani officially joining as co-lead in 2023.

Gambit has received core support since 2023 from the Alan Turing Institute as part of the “Automated analysis of strategic interactions” project.