Ideas for a Gambit game library/catalog

[edwardchalstrey1]

Gambit games library/catalog idea

Currently the Gambit sample games page contains an alphabetical list of game downloads with game descriptions and links. The purpose of this discussion thread is to think about ideas for how this could be improved upon. Some games are also defined in code in tests/games.py.

Examples of game catalogs from other software

• OpenSpiel games lists games alphabetically with some basic metadata in a table:
  • no. of players
  • Is deterministic?
  • Has pefect information?
  • Description with links to papers
  • In PySpiel, list and load games:
    • pyspiel.load_game("matrix_rps")
    • pyspiel.registered_names()
• Gamut games games are in class categories:
  • Includes classes, subsets and supersets
  • Image on homepage suggests that categorising games is hard/messy, so is it worthwhile?
• Sagemath has a catalog of normal form games which includes:
  • Detailed description with equations
  • Python & Sage code for loading and recreating the game
  • Also code for Nash eq computation
  • This effectively results in mini tutorials for each game

Some initial ideas

• Rather than classification of games in sub-folders/ hierarchy or a table with many columns, perhaps a better way to represent categories and metadata would be to have tags (and perhaps also allow multiple names)
• What each tag means would need to be findable
• Ability to filter on any tag
• Games can have any number of tags, but perhaps include a few mandatory choices e.g. one of Extensive/Normal/Sequence form
  • Filter on other metadata e.g. number of players (could also be an enforced tag)
  • In fact, much of this can be auto-populated from the inherent attributes in the Gambit games
• Way to list games and load games in PyGambit
• Scrolling the library you can see all the games drawn with draw_tree
• Could even replicate Sagemath by having the lines of Python code to load game and calculate eq
• Perhaps all games in the library should have accompanying Python script
• Contribution guidelines page/section for "Add a new game to the Gambit library", including an issue template for "New game" so people can request a new game be added. Creating a PR with the contribution yourself would involve something like:
  • Add a Python script that creates the game
  • Add the resulting EFG/NFG
  • Some way to add metadata/tags, perhaps a JSON file for this?
  • Update the game library page (though perhaps this can be automated)
• Need a sensible/consistent way to name games

Questions

1. How many games should be in the Gambit game library?
2. Do we want a complex classification and/or tagging system, or is the current alphabetical order list fine?
3. What are the features of games we want to highlight/diferentiate on in any table, tagging or classification system?
4. If the game library remains a list of EFG/NFG files should the API for loading a game be like:
   • pygambit.load("one_card_poker") (like OpenSpiel) OR
   • could replace load with read or load_game OR
   • pygambit.normal_form_games.PrisonersDilemma() , pygambit.extensive_form_games.OneCardPoker() (like SageMath)
   • Can also have a pygambit.list_games() func or similar

[edwardchalstrey1]

Hi @tturocy @rahulsavani I wrote some notes on this topic and thought it made sense to open it as a GitHub discussion (discussions are similar to issues but not specific to one task or needing to be "completed").

[edwardchalstrey1]

Some discussion in #724 (comment)