The most visible component of Gambit, especially for the new user, is the graphical user interface. This program is an "integrated development environment" to help visually construct games and to investigate their strategic features.
The graphical interface is largely intended for the interactive construction and analysis of small to medium games. Repeating the caution from the introduction of this manual, the computation time required for the equilibrium analysis of games increases rapidly in the size of the game. The graphical interface is ideal for students learning about the fundamentals of game theory, or for practitioners prototyping games of interest. In graduating to larger applications, users are encouraged to make use of the underlying Gambit libraries and programs directly. More details on Gambit's command-line tools for analyzing games are available in Chapter 3.
The documentation of the graphical interface focuses on detailing the concepts and features of the program. To get started using the program, recommend viewing the selection of tutorials available on the "Documentation" page of the Gambit website. These tutorials illustrate the use of the graphical interface in analyzing some common types of games, and are suitable for users with any level of experience with game theory. Students, in particular, may find some of the examples helpful with coursework.
We encourage new users to check out at least a selection of the tutorials prior to attempting to digest this manual. This is because:
The animations in the tutorials do a good job of illustrating how to use the program visually, far better than a static manual can.
The tutorials focus on using the graphical interface for particular tasks in the analysis of games, and thus group features more naturally for their respective uses.
Most importantly, while we attempt to make this documentation as clear, complete, and accurate as possible, the Gambit maintainers are notoriously bad documentation writers!
Once you're comfortable with some of the tutorials, this manual ought to be helpful in filling in some of the gaps, and listing more completely the features of the graphical interface.