I'm going to quote Brams & Fishburn's definition of Condorcet, because it shows the use of MaxMin to describe a procedure that looks at all of a candidate's pair-comparisons, rather than just at his pair-losses. If MaxMin is used in that way, it's reasonable that MinMax can mean that too. It seems to me that I've mostly only run across MaxMin definitions in academic writing. Brams & Fishburn's definition: "Condorcet's procedure [Condorcet (1785), Black (1958)] is a MaxMin procedure. [That would come as a surprise to Condorcet, judging by the translations that I've seen--Mike] Let v*(x) = min{v(x,y):y an element of X\{x}}. Then x an element of F maximizes v*(x) over X. v(x,y), I assume, is the number of people who voted x over y. I assume that F is the set of winners. I rendered the "an element of" symbol by words. Their definition doesn't say anything about whether x beats y or vice-versa. Mike Ossipoff ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com