[EM] number of possible ranked ballots given N candidates

[rob brown]

On 12/14/05, Paul Kislanko <kislanko at airmail.net> wrote:
>
> Agree, but I am more interested in similarity of voters' ballots than
> similarity of candidates.
>

Not sure what you mean by similarity of ballots.

I was referring to the thing I mentioned in a previous post, which is
"similarity of platform as perceived by the voters" of the candidates, which
should be completely independent of "popularity of the candidate", which is
what, in essense, both the pairwise matrix and your matrix measure (albeit
in different ways).

Maybe that is an oversimplification, and speaking of "platform" is not
exactly a mathematical term (or one that generalizes to non-political
voting), but hopefully you see what I am talking about.  To put it another
way, I was looking for a dimension that that is more-or-less perpendicular
to that which the pw matrix measures.

This is straying pretty far from my original question, but I find it
interesting nonetheless.
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