Merge pull request #28 from gambitproject/add-hidden-history

Add "about" page

Author: edwardchalstrey1

config.yaml

@@ -28,10 +28,6 @@ params:
     description:
       - "Gambit is a set of software tools for doing computation on finite, noncooperative games in extensive or strategy form and a set of file formats for storing and communicating games to external tools."
       - "The Gambit Project was founded in the mid-1980s at the California Institute of Technology and to this day is actively developed by a community of contributors, with core development led by [The Alan Turing Institute](https://www.turing.ac.uk) as part of its project: [Automated analysis of strategic interactions](https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/automated-analysis-strategic-interactions)."
-    # timeline:
-    #   image: gambit_timeline.svg
-    #   title: "Through the years"
-    #   subtitle: "The tools for computational game theory research, from BASIC to the language model era."
     software_title: "Open source & free to use"
     software:
       - name: PyGambit

content/about.md

@@ -0,0 +1,178 @@
+---
+title: About 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](/team/) 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](http://www.gambit-project.org/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](http://www.gambit-project.org/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.