I ran across this: David Meyer and Thad Brown, "Statistical Mechanics of Voting", _Physical Review Letters_, Volume 81, page 1718-1721
I haven't read it yet, but it's the first article on voting I've ever encountered from a physicist's perspective. I need to make a point of some day talking to Prof. Meyer (he's in San Diego these days, last I heard). He does a lot on quantum game theory, and since elections can be analyzed from a game-theoretic perspective it seems reasonable to ask if insights from election methods can shed light on quantum game theory. As to why somebody would care about quantum game theory, well, it may be relevant to quantum computation, which has enormous potential applications. The basic idea is you take ideas from computation and discover that if your logic is quantum rather than Boolean then certain problems can be solved in many fewer iterations (we're talking exponential speed-ups here). Since nature has kindly provided us with objects that obey quantum logic (e.g. electrons) there are people working on quantum computation right now. Anyway, I need to read this paper. Alex ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
