[EM] Interesting Article

[Alex Small]

I ran across this:

David Meyer and Thad Brown, "Statistical Mechanics of Voting", _Physical
Review Letters_, Volume 81, page 1718-1721


I haven't read it yet, but it's the first article on voting I've ever
encountered from a physicist's perspective.  I need to make a point of
some day talking to Prof. Meyer (he's in San Diego these days, last I
heard).  He does a lot on quantum game theory, and since elections can be
analyzed from a game-theoretic perspective it seems reasonable to ask if
insights from election methods can shed light on quantum game theory.

As to why somebody would care about quantum game theory, well, it may be
relevant to quantum computation, which has enormous potential
applications.  The basic idea is you take ideas from computation and
discover that if your logic is quantum rather than Boolean then certain
problems can be solved in many fewer iterations (we're talking exponential
speed-ups here).  Since nature has kindly provided us with objects that
obey quantum logic (e.g. electrons) there are people working on quantum
computation right now.

Anyway, I need to read this paper.



Alex


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