Craig Carey said:
What the blazes ?: OSSIPOFF's Python code couldn't even accept ballot paper counts as input. That is what I saw at the Piaelli website.
I reply:
Very good point. I agree that it didn't make sense for the Python listing to not have code for receiving and counting rankings. The Python code that I'd written, and Russ had it in its final debugged version, received and counted the raw input to get the pairwise vote totals.
I wanted the program to be usable by anyone who wanted to copy it, and I wanted it to be complete and self-contained. So I included code to receive the rankings from a keyboard, and, from those rankings, to determine the pairwise vote totals, and use those to determine the winner.
Russ passionately insisted no one would want to enter rankings from the kekyboard. One could ask, then, if he thought that people would rather determine the pairwise vote totals without any assistance from a computer program.
Sure, for a user who writes programs, that user can write his own ranking-receiving and counting program. But I wanted the program to be accessible to people who weren't inclined to write their own input code. No such luck. Russ left out the keyboard input and count code, leaving a program that had the pairwise vote totals as its inputs--inputs to be obtained by the user however s/he manages to.
Of course someone who wants to write their own input code could disregard the keyboard-input code.
By the way, the code to receive the rankings from a keyboard and count them to find the pairwise vote totals was considerably longer than the part that uses those pairwise vote totals for the BeatpathWinner algorithm. That's because, for practical use, it's necessary to give the user a way to correct any keyboard-input errors that s/he makes, and to indicate when s/he has completed each ranking, and when s/he has entered all the rankings. That makes the code considerably longer.
ike Ossipoff
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