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Improve and clarify documentation of enumpoly
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tturocy committed Jan 10, 2025
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Expand Up @@ -8,9 +8,13 @@ and inequalities.
This program searches for all Nash equilibria in a strategic game
using a support enumeration approach. This approach computes all the
supports which could, in principle, be the support of a Nash
equilibrium, and then searches for a totally mixed equilibrium on that
support by solving a system of polynomial equalities and inequalities
formed by the Nash equilibrium conditions.
equilibrium. For each candidate support, it attempts to compute
totally mixed equilibria on that support by successively subdividing
the space of mixed strategy profiles or mixed behavior profiles (as appropriate).
By using the fact that the equilibrium conditions imply a collection
of equations and inequalities which can be expressed as multilinear
polynomials, the subdivision constructed is such that each cell
contains either no equilibria or exactly one equilibrium.

For strategic games, the program searches supports in the order proposed
by Porter, Nudelman, and Shoham [PNS04]_. For two-player games, this
Expand All @@ -27,13 +31,15 @@ digit 1 represents a strategy which is present in the support, and the
digit 0 represents a strategy which is not present. Each candidate
support is printed with the label "candidate,".

Note that the subroutine to compute a solution to the system of
polynomial equations and inequalities will fail in degenerate cases.
The approach of subdividing the space of totally mixed profiles assumes
solutions to the system of equations and inequalities are isolated
points. In the case of degeneracies in the resulting system,
When the verbose switch `-v` is used, these supports are identified on
standard output with the label "singular,". It is possible that there
exist equilibria, often a connected component of equilibria, on these
singular supports.

standard output with the label "singular,". This will occur
if there is a positive-dimensional set of equilibria which all
share the listed support. However, the converse is not true:
not all supports labeled as "singular" will necessarily be the
support of some set of equilibria.

.. program:: gambit-enumpoly

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