There has been a pattern in the computer industry of some group defining a benchmark to measure the performance of various computers, and then the next generation of computers does amazingly well on popular benchmarks. There have even been pretty obvious cases where some feature was added to a computer that had very little real world usefulness but sure made the benchmarks awesome.
I relate this little cautionary tale because of the latest round of claims that simulation results prove method X is the best ever. Of course, I did the same thing with my sims ( http://bolson.org/voting/ sim.html ) way back 4-5 years ago. I designed a simulator that could measure the social utility of election results, and naturally the best result came from the election method which just summed up voter's personal-utility-votes and picked the overall best. That's an awful lot like ideal range voting. And indeed it's great and expressive and better than Condorcet _when everyone is honest_. http://www.rangevoting.org/StratHonMix.html It's measuring the wrong thing. Isn't that performance curve about the same as without any strategic players? Good methods get good answers, even in the face of adversity, ok, BUT Do the strategic voters make out unfairly well vs the honest voters? (in sims I ran, they do) THAT is the problem with strategy vulnerable election methods, like raw rating summation or WDS's "range voting". That's what I designed IRNR to solve, squash the power of approval- ized ratings ballots and make casting honest differences between choices interesting again. It turns out to have some inconsistencies and oddities, but I still think it's pretty good and maybe fixable. I'll have to take a closer look at Hay. I personally absolutely insist on deterministic election methods, so I got turned off to Hay when I read that it was non-deterministic and had a deterministic lesser sibling; but from the discussion it sounds like there's something to it. Maybe its transform is what I was looking for in IRNR. Brian Olson http://bolson.org/ ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
