[EM] Chris BC reply

[Juho]

On Feb 18, 2007, at 2:32 , Chris Benham wrote:
> There is group of pairwise methods that use "winning votes" to measure
> "defeat strength" that as I understand it always give
> the same winner unless there are more than three candidates in a top
> cycle. That situation would be very very rare and almost
> certainly would never happen in a public political election, so for
> practical intents and purposes the differences between them
> are insignificant and they are one method.
>
> The most prominent member of this group is Schulze (aka Beatpath), but
> others are the Winning Votes versions of Ranked Pairs,
> River, and Smith//MinMax. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this all
> that you are referring to by "a set of methods"?

Good description. This nicely defines one category of Condorcet  
methods that are almost identical (for most practical purposes).

My simple categorization of the basic Condorcet methods is as follows.
A) how to measure preference strength between two candidates =>  
margins and winning votes are the common alternatives (but I don't  
exclude others)
B) is there a philosophy to "fix" only the cyclic preferences and  
keep the "straight" ones => leads e.g. to respect of the Smith set

In this categorization Chris Benham's set is A = winning votes, B =  
yes. (There are good methods also on the other side of the fence,  
like minmax(margins).)

Juho Laatu


	
	
		
___________________________________________________________ 
All new Yahoo! Mail "The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use." - PC Magazine 
http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html