[EM] MAM vs Schulze

[Juho Laatu]

> On 09 Oct 2016, at 21:32, Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com> wrote:
> We want to disregard as few defeats as possible. Plainly, if it's necessary to disregard one of the defeats in a cycle, then it should be the weakest one.
> 
I almost agree with that but not quite. When picking the winner, the target is not to make the group opinion a linear opinion (where cycles have been broken, and some pairwise defeats disregarded). The idea is rather to accept the fact that group opinions may sometimes be cyclic, and identify a single best winner despite of that. One needs to identify one winner, but there is no need to break cycles of make the group opinion linear.

It is a fact that if there is no Condorcet winner, there is some candidate that would beat the winner in a pairwise comparison. But that's about as far as we need to go in the direction of disregarding defeats.

Some methods may well be based on a philosophy that is based on breaking cycles, but others need not do that. One simple example could be one that resorts to Approval if there is no Condorcet winner. That method quite clearly makes some sense, but doesn't break any cycles, or at least doesn't care about the preference strengths of the cycles, or the pairwise losses of the winner.

Just trying to be very exact on what the single winner methods are supposed to do.
BR, Juho

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