Dear all,

This might be a stupid question but I was wondering if SociallyBest exists at all, and if some day it will be found. I notice that the current approach to find a good voting method is proposing one on the first hand, and then comparing its performance with other methods based on Bayesian Regret, which, by the way, I don’t know how to evaluate.

My question for the mathematicians in this list, or perhaps this is a suggestion, is why not trying a different approach: to evolve a voting method, using some symbolic regression technique, that minimizes BR? Choosing the correct input variables might be a very dificult task, or not? Some of them could even be, besides the ballots data, Honfrac, NumVoters, UtilMeth and/or IgnoranceAmplitude.

Perhaps some artificial inteligence tool, like neural networks or genetic algorithms, or a combination of both, could be used to search SociallyBest (zero BR), or at least get near it. If such formula is found, it could be truly complex or iloggical, something like a “black box” voting method, but mathematically very good.

Don’t you believe this approach could be tried? Just to give you a hint, are you aware of a technique called Gene Expression Programming? GEP was developed by a portuguese scientist and there is a software tool called GeneXproTools that implements it (see www.gepsoft.com). This symbolic regression tool allows a user defined fitness function, which could be BR, and there is a demo version for download from their website.

Sorry if this ideia is totally ignorant.
Regards,

Ricardo Carvalho

PS: Could someone please provide a VB routine to calculate BR?

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