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Strategy in R: Game Theory, Simulation, and Machine Intelligence

Welcome!

Strategy in R cover A free, open-source book on game theory, simulation, and machine intelligence — implemented end-to-end in R.

About this book

Strategy in R brings two ideas together: the formal language of game theory and the practical computation that makes it tractable. Part I builds the foundations from scratch — normal- and extensive-form games, Nash equilibrium, mixed strategies, Bayesian games, repeated games, and cooperative game theory. Part II tours the R toolkit (GameTheory, CoopGame, gtree, nashpy via reticulate, custom solvers).

Parts III and IV move into simulation and AI: Monte Carlo methods, agent-based models, Axelrod’s tournament, replicator dynamics, evolutionarily stable strategies, network games, performance with Rcpp, then reinforcement learning, multi-agent RL, self-play and AlphaZero, counterfactual regret minimisation, GANs as minimax games, and LLM agents.

Parts V and VI close with applications (auctions, mechanism design, matching markets, bargaining, empirical case studies) and a section on ethics and the future of strategic AI.

The book is for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners with working R fluency who want to apply it to strategic interaction. It assumes no prior game-theory background. It is not a pure-mathematics textbook, not a general machine-learning textbook, and not a software-engineering manual.

How to use this book

  • Reading paths. Front-to-back works; theorists can skim Parts II–IV; R programmers can dip into Parts II–IV and refer back to Part I as needed.
  • Code lives under R/ (helpers, theme, solvers) and python/ (CFR, deep RL via reticulate); example data under data/. Every chapter is rebuildable in isolation: bookdown::preview_chapter("12-gtree-package.Rmd").
  • Per-chapter PDF. Every chapter page has a “⬇ Download this chapter (PDF)” button in the top-right.
  • Whole-book downloads. The PDF and EPUB are linked from the navbar’s Download menu.
  • Corrections and suggestions go to the issue tracker.

License

The content of this book is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (see LICENSE-CONTENT). Source code is released under the MIT License.

Citing this Guide

The suggested citation is:

Heller, R. (2026). Strategy in R: Game Theory, Simulation, and Machine Intelligence (Version v0.1.0). Self-published via GitHub Pages. https://r-heller.github.io/strategy-in-r/.

Download the reference as BibTeX or RIS.

This book was built by the bookdown R package.