David Doshay wrote: > I looked up borda voting on Wikipedia. I did not know this was called > Borda voting, and it might be called a zeroth-order version of what I > am thinking. Rather than just take rank order from each, I intended to > try to include other metrics, for example, some measure of distance > from top. One engine may evaluate that there is one really great move > with all others considered very bad. That is different than many nearly > equal good moves.
But take care - it's my understanding that borda relies totally on ranking ALL choices and that to work correctly every agent much vote on ALL candidates, ranking them from best to worst. Voting theory is like hashing or building random number generators. It's really easy to do it wrong and screw it up and think you did it right. In this case, if you refuse to vote for some of the candidates you upset the system. It is required in borda counting to rank EVERY candidate even if you hate the 2nd choice. That is because the whole rationale is about finding a candidate that fits, as best as possible, the highest vote for everyone and by leaving information out it doesn't work as intended. You might be more interested in a system called "approval voting." In approval voting you have several candidates running for election, and you vote on 1 or more of them, as many as you want. If you are dead set on only one person, you just vote for that guy. However, if you are dead set AGAINST 1 candidate, you may want to vote for everyone else to decrease his chances of winning. What prevents most people from just voting for 1 candidate is the fact that you may really despise some choices and so you vote for those you can live with. Candidate that many voters either hate or love won't win. The winner will be a candidate that the majority of voters find to be a reasonable, if not their favorite, choice. Both borda and approval voting are considered superior to the one man one vote system by scientists in voting theory, but it's understood that there is no fair voting system possible, some are just much more unfair and subject to manipulation that others. Borda voting is excellent in that it is not subject to manipulation as much as many other system. (For example, you prefer candidate C, but you feel he has no chance of getting elected so you vote for candidate A. In borda voting you get to explicitly list your choices in order.) I suggest that when you get around to building a system, you use borda counting as your base case and try to improve on that later. Read all the papers you can on voting theory and the pitfalls they have and you may be surprised. Terry Mcintyre's last message was insightful, some kind of voting system can greatly simplify the task of trying to normalize so many disparate systems of valuing moves. - Don > > > Cheers, > David > > > > On 1, Feb 2008, at 2:41 PM, Don Dailey wrote: > >> I'm not expert on decision theory, but it's my understanding that borda >> counting or voting is excellent way to integrate different decision >> making agents. Of course this depends a lot on the nature of the >> decision to be made, but if you have N choices and several agents that >> are capable of ranking those choices, the whole is greater than the sum >> of the parts. >> >> One of my first primitive MC programs evolved moves using genetic >> algorithms. I discovered it worked surprisingly better to evolve a >> handful of players and borda vote the best choice. It was surprisingly >> the best use of resources I could find, based on a simple evolution >> strategy that is. >> >> I don't really understand why it worked so well. I think it is because >> any particular playing strategy is pretty brittle. The nature of the >> evolved individuals was such that were probably full of >> intransitives. They could beat particular strategies easily, but were >> susceptible to other strategies and with borda voting you tended to find >> a move that was reasonable with many strategies instead of super-tuned >> for just a few. >> >> There are many papers on making decisions using borda voting, and some >> of these papers are not just about voting theory or sociology but >> computer based decisions too. >> >> Like I say, I don't know much about this and perhaps you do, but I >> thought I would present it just in case. I think it's very >> interesting figuring out how to integrate knowledge based on "experts" >> or agents that have wildly varying strengths and weaknesses. >> >> - Don > > _______________________________________________ > computer-go mailing list > computer-go@computer-go.org > http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/ > _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
