On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 21:33:19 +0100, Markus Schulze <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Dear Paul, > > your Condorcet/RP variant sounds like Steve Eppley's > "minimize thwarted majorities" (MTM) method.
Thanks for the pointer! Having a bit of difficulty finding a definition of MTM online, but there seems to be this definition: http://lists.topica.com/lists/RankedPairs/read/message.html?mid=1604391148&sort=d&start=65 which is very similar but reversed. For each of the n! possible orderings of the candidates, MTM generates a "sorted thwarted list" by sorting the lower triangle least first, then picks the ordering with the least sorted thwarting list; my method generates a "sorted affirmed list" by sorting the upper triangle greatest first, then picks the ordering with the greatest sorted affirmed list. I'd guess given this similarity that both possibilities must have occured to Eppley - I wonder what the advantages of each are? I can't resist demonstrating how simple some things are to prove for this method. For instance, consider the Smith criterion. Any ordering which does not rank all members of the Smith set above all members must at some point have a non-member immediately above a member. Swapping these two is therefore bound to produce an ordering with a better "sorted affirmed list"; therefore a list that does not meet this criterion cannot be the winning list. -- __ \/ o\ Paul Crowley /\__/ www.ciphergoth.org ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info