[EM] Condorcet should be called Instant Round Robin (IRR)

[Jobst Heitzig]

Hi Jan!

You wrote:
> I strongly urge everyone to get into the habit of calling Condorcet
> methods Instand Round Robin (IRR) methods.  The Instant Round Robin
> name is far more descriptive than "Condorcet".  

I'm not so sure, Jan, since many Condorcet-efficient methods do not
require all (n-1)*n/2 pairwise comparisons to be carried out. For
example, ROWS is Condorcet-efficient and only requires n-1 comparisons,
which is by far less. Also, I don't see why the fact that a method
passes a certain criterion such as Condorcet-efficiency should have any
influence on the method's name.

However, I agree with you that when naming a method or criterion one
should be careful to choose a descriptive name, and that naming after
persons is very bad style (unless one can interpret the name as an
acronym as in "RaMON").

> I think the concept
> of a round robin tournament is widely understood, even among people
> who are not sports fans. The general public will feel a lot more
> comfortable with a voting method that is tied to a familiar concept
> (round robin tournaments), than to a method with an unfamiliar name
> that a lot of Americans don't even know how to pronounce.

Well, I don't especially care about what Americans can pronounce :-)

> Similarly, the Condorcet Winner could be called the Beats-All Winner.
> It's a lot easier for a newcomer to the subject of election methods
> to understand and remember the idea of a Beats-All Winner than a
> Condorcet Winner.

This I find a very good idea, especially because the concept of
Beats-All Winner was known hundreds of years before Condorcet. I will
try to switch to this terminology.

Yours, Jobst