Augustin wrote: > On Friday 27 Feb 2004 4:46 am, Eric Gorr wrote: >> Apparently the Haifa Linux Club (Israeli Linux User Group >> - http://www.haifux.org/) used my Condorcet voting >> calculator to select their logo. There were 16 options >> and 20 voters. I found it interesting that no cycles were >> generated in this case. -snip- > That there was no cycle is understandable: the chosen design > is indeed much better than the other ones. It is actually > an Ideal Democratic Winner, so the outcome is > straightforward. -snip-
The argument that the winner was much better than the rest only explains why there was a Condorcet winner (an alternative such that, for each of the other alternatives, some majority ranks it over the other). It doesn't explain why there weren't any cycles among the lesser alternatives. By the way, I counted only 15 alternatives when I pasted the votes Eric posted into my MAM calculator webpage. (My latest version of the calculator was installed today, linked at "http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~seppley".) On a somewhat unrelated subject: During the California governor recall election last year, there was a test of individual "rationality" (which I prefer to call transitivity, a term not as loaded). A Caltech professor, Rod Kiwiet, surveyed about 1000 likely voters during the week before the election, and asked each voter to state a preference in each of the 6 pairings of the 4 major candidates. Nearly every respondent stated 6 pairwise preferences that were transitive, consistent with some ordering of the 4 candidates. The number of those who didn't was small enough that Rod said it could have been explained by typos by his staff. What was most surprising is that Rod said such a study of individual transitivity in a major election had never been done before. ---Steve (Steve Eppley [EMAIL PROTECTED]) ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info