0.2 Gambit versus GTE

Gambit is open-source software for game theory. It has been around since the 1990's and has extensive documentation at http://www.gambit-project.org/doc/index.html

Gambit is currently being designed and maintained by Ted Turocy. It has been supported by student developers from the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) since 2011. As part of this GSoC project, an additional branch of development is the Game Theory Explorer (GTE), supervised by Bernhard von Stengel and Rahul Savani.

Gambit is a software suite that works on Windows, Linux and Mac systems and has to be downloaded to be made to work. In contrast, GTE is meant to work in a web browser. The browser provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for the input of game trees (called games in extensive form) and games represented by tables of payoffs (called games in strategic form). The user can create, store, and edit such games, export them as attractive pictures, and compute equilibria "via mouseclick", with the results displayed back in the browser where they can be copied.

One reason for the browser interface is to avoid the initial technical hurdle of installing a software package for a user who tries this for the first time, or only infrequently. A second is to try out new ways of drawing game trees, for example. GTE was therefore started as a separate development from Gambit.

An example of a browser-based game solver is Rahul Savani's webpage Solve a Bimatrix Game. This webpage allows the computation of all equilibria of a game in strategic form for two players, which is called a bimatrix game because it is specified by two matrices that specify the players' payoffs. GTE is meant to provide an equivalent capability to Rahul's webpage.

Eventually, Gambit and GTE are meant to be used together, and integrated so as to employ the strengths of the two systems. In particular, solution algorithms for finding equilibria can be shared, which just requires a suitable file format for communication. We also envisage that the scripting capabilities in Gambit in Python can be harvested from a browser interface. For the moment, the two developments continue separately because GTE is still undergoing many changes.