I was reading Slashdot this morning, and saw the following submission: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/06/0314201
I then clicked on the first link: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=6&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=microsoft.AS.&s2=rank.AB.&OS=AN/microsoft+AND+ABST/rank&RS=AN/microsoft+AND+ABST/rank Here's the abstract: A unique system and method that facilitates improving the ranking of items is provided. The system and method involve re-ranking decreasing subsets of high ranked items in separate stages. In particular, a basic ranking component can rank a set of items. A subset of the top or high ranking items can be taken and used as a new training set to train a component for improving the ranking among these high ranked documents. This process can be repeated on an arbitrary number of successive high ranked subsets. Thus, high ranked items can be reordered in separate stages by focusing on the higher ranked items to facilitate placing the most relevant items at the top of a search results list. Now, like all patent applications, this is full of verbose, obfuscatory legalese, but it seems like they just patented Nanson's method, plus any other method that sorts a group of candidates, drops a subset of those candidates based on some criteria, and recalculate (practically any Condorcet completion method -- take the circular tie and apply another method to break the tie). Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but I thought I'd ask the rest of the group if that's what it looks like, or if I missed something. Thanks! Michael Rouse [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
