>One or more examples of real votes will suffice to show if the claim(s) of >a >method is(are) ambiguous. Of course an example is needed. But the example isn't enough, by itself, to show that a criterion is ambiguious. What's needed is claims, by someone defending the criterion's current wording, and by someone claiming ambiguity for it, of what it means to meet a criterion. Markus has claimed that such a meaning must include a requirement that the criterion's requirement be met no matter which N-candidate permutation of the example's candidates are taken as the N candidates referred to by letters in the criterion. That seems quite incompatible with the wording of the criteria, and It's never occurred to me that anyone believed that that should be required. Anyway, I've written, in my reply to Markus tonight (September 17th 2000, 4:33:02 GMT) a claim for what it means to meet a criterion that names candidates by letters. This meaning is more general than yesterday's, and simpler, and makes more sense. The reason why I wrote it differently yesterday is that I was working from Markus's claim. He said that,for every permutation of N candidates from the example, the criterion's requirement must be met for those N candidates--and so I said instead of requiring it to be met for _all_ of the permutations of the example's candidates simultaneously, it should only have to be met by each one of those permutations, taken one at a time. But that's an awkward 2-step meaning, where we pick an example, and then , additionally, start picking permutations of its candidates. Tonight's meaning is more general, where we instead try examples such that each example has an A, B, C... That's briefer, simpler, neater. And it also happens to work without contradictions or inconsistency for criteria that say that a certain group of voters must have a certain kind of a way to vote. You could say I contrived the meaning to work with that kind of a criterion, but I point out that this meaning is simpler, briefer, neater. I asked Markus to post what he thinks it means to meet a criterion that names some candidates by letter designations, but he hasn't posted one. Presumably, if he did, it would be one that incorporates his requirement that the criterion's requirement be met simultaneously with respect to every one of the N-candidate permutations that could be taken from the example's candidates to be the N candidates that the criterion refers to by letters. I suspect that maybe such a meaning might run into contradictions or inconsistencies when trying to say what kind of an example is needed. In any case, Markus hasn't suggested a meaning, and so the one that I wrote tonight is the only one so far. But I hope Markus doesn't claim that, because his type of meaning can't be defined without inconsistencies or contradictions, that means that those are problems of my criteria. No, they're only problems of that type of a compliance meaning for criteria. And if Markus's type of meaning has those problems, then he can't say that that's what it should mean to meet a criterion that refers to candidates by letter designations. That, in addition to the more obviousness & reasonableness of my claimed meaning, is another reason why Markus' requirement is unreasonable. Mike Ossipoff _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.
