[EM] Discover Magazine article

[Blake Cretney]

Dear Markus and Mike,

On Wed, 25 Oct 2000, Markus Schulze wrote:
> 
> Mike wrote (25 Oct 2000):
> > An example: Steve said that, when Tideman(wv) and BeatpathWinner
> > give different results, the Tideman(wv) winner pairbeats the
> > BeatpathWinner winner in the vast majority of cases. So if the
> > people could choose between those winners, they'd choose the
> > Tideman winner, and so the use of Tideman is more democratic.
> >
> > Markus replied that there could be a cycle of such relationships
> > among methods, and that that invalidates the idea. But that's an
> > IRVie argument against Condorcet.

I favour Tideman, but it's obvious that Markus is right on this
point.  Just because someone could use a similar argument to support
IRV doesn't make the argument invalid.  Not every possible argument
against IRV is automatically valid.

> Norman wrote about Steve's argumentation (27 May 2000):
> > Copeland, for example almost
> > certainly violates clone criteria, whereas Schulze's method is
> > the only method (that I'm aware of) that has been proven to
> > satisfy one strong formulation of Clone Independence criteria.
> > Tideman satisfies a weaker definition of clone independence,

I think this is a confusion.  Given similar tie-breakers Schulze and
Tideman will be clone independent by the same criterion.  Tideman
proposed a simpler tie-breaker that fails a stronger GITC.  The
argument is really about the tie-breaker (involving draws of random
ballots), and not about the deterministic part of the method.

Also, I think before reading to much into the fact that the criterion
is weaker, one should understand how much weaker, and in what way.

---
Blake Cretney