Gambit: Software Tools for Game Theory | ||
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An introduction to Gambit
The Gambit Project is a project for the development of computer code for the solution of extensive and normal form games. The software developed under the project is distributed under the GNU General Public License. The Gambit Project has been funded in the past by National Science Foundation grants SBR-9308637 and SBR-9617854 to the California Institute of Technology and SBR-9308862 to the University of Minnesota.
The Gambit Project was founded in the mid-1980s by Richard McKelvey. The original implementation was a graphical interface written in BASIC. The code was ported to C around 1990 with the help of Bruce Bell, and this version was distributed publicly as version 0.13 in 1991 and 1992.
A major step in the evolution of Gambit took place with the awarding of the NSF grants in 1994, with McKelvey and Andrew McLennan as principal investigators. The grants sponsored a complete rewrite of Gambit in C++, with the code taking essentially the organization it has today. The graphical interface was made portable across platforms through the use of the wxWindows library (http://www.wxwindows.org), and a scripting language, the Gambit Command Language, was developed. Version 0.94 of Gambit was released in the late summer of 1994, and version 0.96 followed in 1999.
Many other individuals have contributed to the project, by coding, documenting, and testing, especially students at Caltech and the University of Minnesota. We wish to acknowledge their contributions alphabetically here:
Bruce Bell | Todd Kaplan |
Anand Chelian | Geoff Matters |
Matthew Derer | Brian Trotter |
Nelson Escobar | Michael Vanier |
Ben Freeman | Roberto Weber |
Eugene Grayver | Gary Wu |
The project especially wishes to thank Bernhard von Stengel, of the London School of Economics, for help and advice on implementation of the sequence form and for contributing his "clique" code for identification of equilibrium components in two person games.
Version 0.97.0.1 of Gambit was released on September 1, 2002. This release featured
A completely redesigned graphical user interface, built with the wxWindows 2.3.2 cross-platform toolkit. Previous releases of Gambit used the older 1.xx series of wxWindows. The new version provides substantially greater functionality and stability. The interface redesign should make many game creation tasks easier.
An implementation of a new algorithm for computing the logistic quantal response equilibrium correspondence, as described in [Tur02]. This algorithm is now essentially unlimited in the size of lambda it can compute, and is much faster than the previous implementation provided by Gambit. This algorithm is now recommended for computing one Nash equilibrium, especially in games with more than two players.
A new function minimization implementation, derived from that available in the GNU Scientific Library, is used in the Lyapunov function minimization algorithm (LiapSolve). It appears this implementation is at least somewhat superior to that provided in previous versions.
The command language interface for Windows has been replaced with a new one built with wxWindows. Additionally, this windowed interface is also available under *nix (called wxgcl).
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