diff --git a/doc/index.rst b/doc/index.rst index 22560eca37..79076153ae 100644 --- a/doc/index.rst +++ b/doc/index.rst @@ -60,7 +60,6 @@ We recommended most new users install the PyGambit Python package and read the a :hidden: :maxdepth: 1 - intro install pygambit tools diff --git a/doc/intro.rst b/doc/intro.rst deleted file mode 100644 index 4938292252..0000000000 --- a/doc/intro.rst +++ /dev/null @@ -1,179 +0,0 @@ -*************** -What is Gambit? -*************** - -Gambit is a set of software tools for doing computation on finite, -noncooperative games. These comprise a graphical interface for -interactively building and analyzing general games in extensive or -strategy form; a number of command-line tools for computing Nash -equilibria and other solution concepts in games; and, a set of file -formats for storing and communicating games to external tools. -Gambit is fully-cross platform, and is supported on Linux, Mac OS X, -and Microsoft Windows. - -Key features of Gambit -====================== - -Gambit has a number of features useful both for the researcher and the -instructor: - -**Interactive, cross-platform graphical interface.** All Gambit -features are available through the use of a graphical interface, which -runs under multiple operating systems: Windows, various flavors of -Un*x (including Linux), and Mac OS X. The interface offers flexible -methods for creating extensive and strategic games. It offers an -interface for running algorithms to compute Nash equilibria, and for -visualizing the resulting profiles on the game tree or table, as well -as an interactive tool for analyzing the dominance structure of -actions or strategies in the game. The interface is useful for the -advanced researcher, but is intended to be accessible for students -taking a first course in game theory as well. - -**Command-line tools for computing equilibria.** More advanced -applications often require extensive computing time and/or the ability -to script computations. All algorithms in Gambit are packaged as -individual, command-line programs, whose operation and output are -configurable. - -**Extensibility and interoperability.** The Gambit tools read and -write file formats which are textual and documented, making them -portable across systems and able to interact with external tools. It -is therefore straightforward to extend the capabilities of Gambit by, -for example, implementing a new method for computing equilibria, -reimplementing an existing one more efficiently, or creating tools to -programmatically create, manipulate, and transform games, or for -econometric analysis on games. - - -Limitations of Gambit -===================== - -Gambit has a few limitations that may be important in some -applications. We outline them here. - -**Gambit is for finite games only.** Because of the mathematical -structure of finite games, it is possible to write many general- -purpose routines for analyzing these games. Thus, Gambit can be used -in a wide variety of applications of game theory. However, games that -are not finite, that is, games in which players may choose from a -continuum of actions, or in which players may have a continuum of -types, do not admit the same general-purpose methods. - -**Gambit is for noncooperative game theory only.** Gambit focuses on -the branch of game theory in which the rules of the game are written -down explicitly, and in which players choose their actions -independently. Gambit's analytical tools center primarily around Nash -equilibrium, and related concepts of bounded rationality such as -quantal response equilibrium. Gambit does not at this time provide any -representations of, or methods for, analyzing games written in -cooperative form. (It should be noted that some problems in -cooperative game theory do not suffer from the computational -complexity that the Nash equilibrium problem does, and thus -cooperative concepts could be an interesting future direction of -development.) - -**Analyzing large games may become infeasible surprisingly quickly.** -While the specific formal complexity classes of computing Nash -equilibria and related concepts are still an area of active research, -it is clear that, in the typical case, the amount of time required to -compute equilibria increases rapidly in the size of the game. In other -words, it is quite easy to write down games which will take Gambit an -unacceptably long amount time to compute the equilibria of. There are -two ways to deal with this problem in practice. One way is to better -identify good heuristic approaches for guiding the equilibrium -computation process. Another way is to take advantage of known -features of the game to guide the process. Both of these approaches -are now becoming areas of active interest. While it will certainly not -be possible to analyze every game that one would like to, it is hoped -that Gambit will both contribute to these two areas of research, as -well as make the resulting methods available to both students and -practitioners. - -Who built Gambit? -================= - -Check out the `team page `__ on the Gambit website for up-to-date information on the current Gambit development team. - -History -------- - -The principal developers of Gambit have been: - -* `Theodore Turocy `__, - University of East Anglia: director. - -* Richard D. McKelvey, California Institute of Technology: - project founder. - -* Andrew McLennan, University of Queensland: co-PI during main - development, developer and maintainer of polynomial-based algorithms - for equilibrium computation. - -Much of the development of the main Gambit codebase took place in -1994-1996, under a grant from the National Science Foundation to the -California Institute of Technology and the University of Minnesota -(McKelvey and McLennan, principal investigators). - -Others contributing to the development and distribution of Gambit -include: - -* Bernhard von Stengel provided advice on implementation of - sequence form code, and contributed clique code - -* Eugene Grayver developed the first version of the - graphical user interface. - -* Gary Wu implemented an early scripting language interface for - Gambit (since superseded by the Python API). - -* Stephen Kunath and Alessandro Andrioni did extensive work to create - the first release of the Python API. - -* From Gambit 14, Gambit contains support for Action Graph Games - [Jiang11]_. This has been 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 Gambit Project was founded in the mid-1980s by Richard McKelvey at -the California Institute of Technology. The original implementation -was written in BASIC, with a simple graphical interface. This code was -ported to C around 1990 with the help of Bruce Bell, and 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, and `Theodore Turocy `__ as the head programmer. -The grants sponsored a complete rewrite of Gambit in C++. The -graphical interface was made portable across platforms through the use -of the wxWidgets library (`http://www.wxwidgets.org -`__). 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. During this time, many students at Caltech and Minnesota -contributed to the effort by programming, testing, and/or documenting. -These include, alphabetically, Bruce Bell, Anand Chelian, Matthew -Derer, Nelson Escobar, Ben Freeman, Eugene Grayver, Todd Kaplan, Geoff -Matters, Brian Trotter, Michael Vanier, Roberto Weber, and Gary Wu. - -Over the same period, Bernhard von Stengel, of the London School of -Economics, 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, as well as other advice -regarding Gambit's implementation and architecture. - -Development since the mid-2000s has focused on two objectives. First, -the graphical interface was reimplemented and modernized, with the -goal of following good interaction design principles, especially in -regards to easing the learning curve for users new to Gambit and new -to game theory. Second, the internal architecture of Gambit was -refactored to increase interoperability between the tools provided by -Gambit and those written independently. - -Gambit is proud to have participated in the Google Summer of Code -program in the summers of 2011 and 2012 as a mentoring organization. -The Python API, which became part of Gambit from Gambit 13, was -developed during these summers, thanks in particular to the work -of Stephen Kunath and Alessandro Andrioni.