[EM] MMPO

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Forest--

You wrote:

I was discouraged when Markus and Steve pointed out to me that MMPO failed 
Clone Winner,

I reply:

It seems to me that the way that MMPO or PC fails ICC, MMC, or GSFC, is not 
a failure that will be  likely or frequent.

Copeland fails ICC in a much more flagrant and problematic way. And Copeland 
is, or at least used to be, popular with authors. Anyone who has ever 
praised Copeland is in no position to criticize MMPO for ICC failure.

You continued:

...since Clone Winner compliance is important for avoiding the spoiler 
problem.

ICC is about a special case in which some candidates are so similar that 
their merit differences among themselves are considered by everyone to be 
negligible compared to other merit differences. Of course it would be 
desirable if no faction could gain or lose advantage by running such a set 
of candidates. But it's about a special case.

But the defensive strategy criteria deal with the spoiler problem, as well 
as the lesser-of-2-evils problem, in its more general aspect.

And MMPO, in addition to meeting FBC, meets SFC and WDSC. And, with AERLO, 
MMPO meets SDSC and Strong FBC.

That's a lot of lesser-of-2-evils protection.

As I said, initially plain MMPO could be proposed. AERLO could be proposed 
in a subsequent initiative, allowing the first MMPO proposal to be simpler 
and more proposable.

As you know, MMPO can be introduced to people very briefly:

Voters rank as many or as few candidates as they want to. Equal ranking is 
allowed.

Elect the candidate over whom fewest people prefer someone else.

[end of suggested public MMPO introduction]

Sure, ideally it should be "voters" instead of "people"; and it should be 
"vote" or "rank" instead of "prefer". But something more precise and 
explicitly complete could follow, or be available. For this introduction, I 
wanted to say it how it would sound briefest, clearest and most compelling.

You continued:

As you know, the problem is that an MMPO winner with a max pairwise 
opposition of, say 40 percent, could be replaced by a cycle in which each 
member was opposed pairwise by some other cycle member on more than 60 
percent of the ballots.

I reply:

Sure. Same with PC. But I don't consider that to be something that will be 
frequent or likely.

You continued:

In a case like this it seems natural to collapse the cycle, and then when 
the MMPO winner turns out to be the collapsed cycle, find the MMPO winner 
within the (reconstituted) cycle.

I reply:

Before BeatpathWinner/CSSD, Ranked-Pairs, or SSD were posted to EM, or at 
least before I understood their advantages, I wanted to try to make PC 
(easily shown to) comply with SDSC, and I tried something that I called the 
"subcycle rule", which involved collapsing cycles. It had problems. Maybe 
cycles can be collapsed in a way that doesen't have the problems that the 
subcycle rules had.

When you refer to collapsing cycles, you mean the way that it's done in the 
sprucing-up procedure, right?

You continued:

Spruced Up MMPO would be too drastic.  Perhaps leaving off the first stage 
of the spruce up process, and proceeding directly to the "beat clone 
collapse" stage would do the trick.

Sprucing up is complicated, isn't it? Too complicated for a public proposal? 
I don't want to ask you to write a long description of its advantages, if 
you don't have a lot of time to, but, just summarizing briefly, what's the 
nature of it's gain?

Could you tell me where I could find a complete definition of the 
sprucing-up procedure, one that includes definitions of the terms used in 
the definition, such as the names of special sets of candidates, etc.?

Mike Ossipoff

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