[EM] The billiard ball theory of voting

[Forest Simmons]

On Mon, 3 Jun 2002, Narins, Josh wrote:

> In computer science there is no difference in the results between a bubble
> sort, a quick sort, et cetera,...

That's true when sorting according to an order relation, but not true for
other relations like "beats" which doesn't satisfy the transitivity
property of order relations.

Suppose that A beats B beats C beats A, and you sort the list

{C,B,A}.

You will get different results from different methods.

For example, sink sort gives {C,A,B} while bubble sort gives {B,C,A}.

Spread the word to computer scientists :-)

Forest


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