Programming

There are various areas of Game theory that are suited to computer programming.

The two areas that naturally sit in this course are:

• The computation of equilibria;
• The study of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma

A quick refresher of using Python

Note that this refresher uses Python 3 and will also go over the use of external libraries.

• I recommend using Anaconda as a distribution of Python. Go to https://www.continuum.io/downloads and follow the instructions there.

• Basics of Python using Jupyter notebooks.

  • Code example
  • Video walk through

• External libraries.

  • Code example
  • Video walk through

Computation of equilibria

To compute equilibria there are 3 pieces of software available to you:

1. Cloud.sagemath (using Sage). Documentation: doc.sagemath.org/html/en/reference/game_theory/index.html

2. NashPy (a standalone Python library).

   • Code example
   • Video walk through

3. Gambit (a piece of software with a Python interface): gambit.sourceforge.net/.

Studying the Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma

The main library used for the study of the Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma is the Axelrod Python library.

• Documentation