[EM] Brief comments about the simulations

MIKE OSSIPOFF nkklrp at hotmail.com
Wed Mar 7 15:16:27 PST 2001



Sometimes simulations are done with random rankings or random ratings,
and sometimes that's better, but usually a spatial simulation is
considered to be the most lifelike one.

Randomly position candidates & voters in an issue space, of one or
more dimensions (But of course if there are more than 3, it won't
make any intuitive sense spatially). For best realism for U.S.
political elections, have the issue dimensions strongly correlated.

By the way, having more than 3 issue dimensions in a spatial simulation
doesn't discourage me in the way that it would in Hoffman's method, because 
in Hoffman's method one is actually working with the geometry,
to integrate a "volume" of many dimensions, between the many
hyperplanes that are its boundaries.  But it's still nice to keep to
only 3 spatial dimensions, so that it makes intuitive sense as something
that we could build a model of, or draw a perspective drawing of.

Some simulations assume that candidates tend to be center-seeking, so
that the candidates are more tightly distribued about the mean than
the voters are.

Mike Ossipoff

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