Friday 4 April 2014

A list of stuff for my student to look at before getting down to some Sage development

+James Campbell will be working with me this Summer on a project aimed at developing game theoretical stuff in to +Sage Mathematical Software System. James just emailed me asking for a list of stuff he could/should read up on before he starts. I thought more knowledgeable people than me might be able to contribute so I've lazily copied my email to him here: 

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Code:

- git
- sage development (tickets, documentation etc... This is something I don't know much about myself so read about it on the Safe site and watch videos on youtube there are a bunch of them)
- cython (http://cython.org/ - watch this intro to Sage lecture by +William Steinhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI4NlMfGHC0 that's the first lecture in a class he's currently giving you also could watch the rest)
- C (to help with cython - you don't necessarily need to be an expert I think)
Test driven development: (watch all this and you will know what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5859017B018F03F4)
- ssh and *nix (so that you're comfortable to jump on to one of my machines if necessary - depending on time we might also get you to tweak the Cardiff server)
- matplotlib (the python library that Sage uses to plot stuff, good to know it from a python pov so as to be able to get Sage to make it do what we want - we might or might not use this)
- How Sage plots graphs (graph theory graphs like I used for this: http://goo.gl/KHGYk7 - we might or might not need this)

Game Theory:


We'll talk about this but 1 of the above (easy to code: 30 minutes of work) will be a gentle appetiser to the 'piece de resistance': normal form games,

- Normal form games (first 6 chapters of http://www.vincent-knight.com/teaching/gametheory/)
- The lrs algorithm (there is an implementation of this written in c that we either want to re-write to get working in Sage so you'll need to understand it or get Sage to talk to it / use it, I know Sage kind of has this as an optional library but I'm not entirely sure how to 'get at it' http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~avis/C/lrs.html)
- Polytopes, you want to be comfortable-ish with the vocabulary around polytopes to be able to understand the lrs algorithm a bit. 

Books:

- In general I'd say don't spend much money on Python books. Like most OSS stuff there's an awesome amount of stuff online. Take a look at: http://pythonbooks.revolunet.com/ (a list of free Python books). There are various exceptions to this rule though.

- With regards to Sage I don't think you need a book for this project (as it's about building stuff for Sage so mainly reading about the development process and watching youtube videos is the way to go), I have a kindle copy of http://goo.gl/q9s9da, it's not bad but really everything is online. If you haven't already take a look at http://sagemath.org/help.html and join the relevant discussion groups on there.

- With regards to Game Theory there's a reading list on my website (all that follow are linked to on there). Webb's book is a gentle introduction, Algorithmic Game Theory is great and more about what you will be looking at. Finally there's a newish book by Maschler which looks really nice but I've not had time to work through it yet. In general my course site should suffice (reading/working through those books could take you years) with regards to what you need to know for game theory and I am certainly not asking you to spend money on a book. If there's a book (GT or code) that you really think would be useful let's talk.

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James is a pretty good coder with a good knowledge of a git based workflow already as his first year project (during which he actually learnt to code) has led his group to develop: http://thefightclub.herokuapp.com/ which is also on github (if you've made your way this far, please click on that and waste a minute or 2 of your life).

If there's anything missing from this list please add it to the comments :)

I'm looking forward to this project.

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