To learn more about this fascinating story, see
http://www.rangevoting.org/ApisMellifera.html
It took me a while to understand the bees' method. At first I thought
it was kind of a hybrid of range voting, plurality voting, and negotiation.
But eventually it dawned on me, after reading Myerscough's paper, that
the latter two procedures really were mathematically essentially
equivalent to picking the candidate with the largest average,
i.e. "range voting with intentional blanks allowed." The bees
are probably not capable of doing the necessary arithmetic and hence
have developed an ingenious totalling procedure which gets the right
answer (averaging & picking the max) but without actually doing any arithmetic.
The net result, I claim, is pretty much equivalent to the range voting
procedure recommended on the CRV front page
http://www.rangevoting.org/
Incredible! (And talk about an ego-diminishing experience - scooped by 20
million years!
Well at least we know who invented range voting now!)
Bees have run about 1 TRILLION elections, which dwarfs everything humans
have ever done, and also dwarfs whatever computer simulations can achieve
(at least, without heroic efforts - give me the US government's top
supercomputer
for a solid century, and maybe I'll start to approach what the bees have
accomplished)
so I think they should be taken seriously.
Warren D Smith
----
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