The Gambit Project

Web Page: http://www.gambit-project.org/ideas.html

Mailing List: mailto:gambit-mentors@nash.lse.ac.uk

Gambit is the premier software project for quantitative analysis in game theory. The project has a 20-year history of providing open-source tools for students, researchers, and practitioners who use game theory in economics, computer science, political science, and other fields.

The director of the project is Dr Theodore Turocy, Senior Lecturer (US Associate Professor) in Economics at the University of East Anglia, who joined the project under founder Prof Richard McKelvey in 1993, and took over primary responsibility for development and maintenance in 2000. Prof Bernhard von Stengel at the London School of Economics, an internationally recognized leader in computation in games, has been a contributor since the late 1990s. Dr Rahul Savani was a PhD student of Prof von Stengel, and is now Lecturer (US Assistant Professor) in the Economics and Computation group at the University of Liverpool.

If you are interested in contributing to the Gambit project, please email us at gambit-mentors@nash.lse.ac.uk with the information requested, as far as you you can provide it, in our application template (http://www.gambit-project.org/gsocapply.html).

We will need this information at any rate when you apply formally to GSoC. Once we have this information we can discuss and help you with your application to GSoC.

Projects

• All Possible Equilibrium reachable by the Lemke-Howson algorithm The Nash Equilibrium of a bi-matrix game can be computed by using the Lemke-Howson algorithm. The aim of the project is to add the functionality of finding all of the possible equilibrium points which which can be reached by this algorithm.
• Finding all equilibria reachable by Lemke-Howson For a two-player in strategic form (also called bimatrix games), what are the Nash equilibria that can be found using the Lemke-Howson method? Each pure strategy as an “initially dropped label” leads to an equilibrium along a computational path obtained by “pivoting” in a linear system. If two equilibria found in that way are different, using the second label on the first equilibrium (and vice versa) will find yet another equilibrium. The set of all equilibria reachable in that way should be recorded and is a (normally) fast way to find many equilibria when the game is large.
• Improve GTE The project Improve GTI is about improving the visual design of the Game Theory Explorer of the GAMBIT project and adding new features to enhance usability.
• Python API for manipulating games The aim of this project is to fully flesh out the existing Python interface and extend it to completion, with special focus on finishing the API for basic game manipulation operations and wrapping the remaining more complex features that are already supported in C++, e.g. representation and manipulation of mixed and behavior strategies. A full test suite will also be written to check correctness and proper handling of error conditions.