Best posts made by culi

@rob Very late to this conversation but what you're describing is exactly the Dasgupta-Maskin method[1] which is just Copeland with a Borda tie breaker. This method has actually been used in figure skating competitions under the name of "one by one"[2]

There are different version of Copeland depending on how you wanna score wins, ties, and losses. Most commonly used is probably the 1/½/0 (1 point for wins, 0.5 points for ties, 0 for losses) method but Lull proposed a 1/1/0 method and 3/1/0 is commonly used in sports. But it seems like you're just using a 1/0/0 Copeland here

This system can also be compared to Black's which is essentially just Condorcet with Borda tiebreaker

[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/maskin/files/voting.pdf
[2] https://sci-hub.se/10.1287/opre.2014.1269

For Condorcet, I would have thought Ranked Pairs and Schulze would be included. Maybe River too.

They are planned. Condorcet algorithms are complicated to implement. This is the second iteration of this project. The first one had some more, but the main goal with this is to cache parts of results for easy re-use. E.g. we shouldn't have to calculate the borda results 3 times for Borda, Black, and STAR. Same principle for pairwise matrices, etc. Instead if we cache that result we can reuse some of the calculations. So it'll take some time to implement a lot of the more complex Condorcet algorithms efficiently. The code repository has a more thorough run-down of the planned additional algorithms. It's open source so feel free to contribute or open an issue

But anyways, that's not really the point of my post. I'm just asking if someone knows of resources where I can find more test case examples instead of having to work them out by hand. Got any?

@keith-edmonds Sorry, but I don't really understand this criticism. The initial voting system blocks were Plurality (fptp the default) and Runoff (IRV the default). IMO these are the two most popular voting systems. I'm not sure if you've read the "explanation" texts, but I feel like there's a very clear and natural progression for all of them. I introduced the 2 most popular methods and then slight variations on them. Yes "coombs" is much less known than "approval" but if someone has already put in the effort to understand IRV, it's really easy to say "coombs is the same thing but instead you drop the most hated candidate each round" than to introduce an entirely new voting system. After FPTP and IRV, I wrote contingency (along with some of its variations) which I'd also say is extremely popular given that the primary/general system is widely used and its an abstraction of that so it's easy to explain.

The whole pattern here is:

1. introduce some popular voting system
2. show them some ways you can modify it and see how that'd change the outcome
3. introduce another voting system (and maybe explain what it does that the previous block didn't)

But anyways, if you MUST know why I really wrote them in the way that I did, it's actually because I've done this project twice. The first time (what I call the prototype) I did it pretty much exactly as you were saying where I started off writing only the most well known voting methods first. It eventually got to the point of 26 voting methods. One major thing I realized is that if I cached the results of other methods, I could make some massive efficiency gains. E.g. no need to calculate the Borda score twice for STAR and Borda when I could reuse the results of the calculation

So the central realization behind this new project is that I could make a really efficient "SuperSystem" that entangles all of these methods at once and calculates all of these results in one go and avoids repeat calculations as much as possible. Organizing the methods into "blocks" makes sense not just as an educational toy, but for the sake of developing this SuperSystem in a way that similar blocks of logic are grouped together.

Anyways, other than STAR, I feel like the latest update includes all the "canonical" popular voting methods so I hope your concerns are alleviated. I'd definitely like to implement STAR and some more Condorcet methods soon though

@rob said in votevote.page is live:

To be clear, I wasn't suggesting limiting to basic colors like that because that defeats the whole purpose. My suggestion would be pick the colors purely visually from a palette (a small 8x8 palette for 64 colors would be perfect), or using a color picker.

Oh gotchu. Yeah not a bad idea

Expecting people to set up a custom dataset is fine, if it's that kind of app.

Oh no, that's not actually what I meant. What I envision is that the default is to use the current color data. But there's a drop down to use other stuff.

For example, in Wikipedia there's a common example given of cities in Tennessee trying to elect a new capital. Each city's preferences are based on their X,Y coordinates and distance from each other. I could totally add this as a dataset as well (with even more cities probably)

And then at that point I think the logical next step is to make one of the drop down options "custom" where the user can enter arbitrary data. This might also actually make this toy somewhat useful. Like if someone already has votes from a scored election and is wondering how the outcome would've differed under a different scoring method, they can enter that data here simulate it all

But the default would still be color-based unless the user specifically decides they wanna go with something else.