[EM] Venzke's election simulations

Warren Smith warren.wds at gmail.com
Tue Jun 8 21:58:46 PDT 2010


And incidentally, L1 distance is not a smooth distance metric, nor is Linfinity,
but Lp distance is smooth for any p with 1<p<infinity.

So really when I say L1 distance, it might be better, if you believe
in smoothness, to use, say L(1.1).

But it will make very little difference.  The change from L2 to L1
might be important.
The change from L1 to L(1.1) will have little impact and would be more
a cosmetic than a real change.

(The suggestion to use Linfinity does not make sense to me.  Just my
opinion.  But in
2 dimensions only, Linfinity and L1 are the same thing if you turn
your head 45 degrees.)


On 6/9/10, Warren Smith <warren.wds at gmail.com> wrote:
>>Forest Simmons:
>>Suppose that the "candidates" (i.e.alternatives) are possible locations for
>> a building, >and that the
>>inconvenience of each alternative for each voter is proportional to the
>> distance from >that voter's residence
>>to the location, or simply the time it takes to get there.  The taxicab
>> distance would be >a natural metric
>>in this situation, but I don't see utility = 1/(1 + distance^2).
>
> --I did not say  1/(1+dist^2)   I said
> utility=1/squareroot(1+distance^2).
>
>>Forest:
>>If I were a voter in this situation, my sincere rating for an alternative
>> at distance x
>>would be
>>    r=(D-x)/(D-d),
>>where D and d, respectively, are the distances to the respective
>> alternatives furthest >and nearest to me.
>
> --We are not speaking about sincere normalized ratings. We are
> speaking of utilities, which definitely are NOT to be normalized in
> this sort of fashion!   Doing so would
> (a) be nuts for the purpose of getting reasonable bayesian regret values
> and also (b) would artificially cause normalized range voting to be a
> "perfect" voting method.
>
>
> --
> Warren D. Smith
> http://RangeVoting.org  <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
> "endorse" as 1st step)
> and
> math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html
>


-- 
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org  <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)
and
math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html



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