2011/7/7 Andy Jennings <[email protected]>

> On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 6:06 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>> Of course, with too many factions, the optimal strategy computation would
>> be intractable.
>>
>
> With twenty candidates, there are about a million different possible
> subsets to consider.  Seems like it could be tractable.
>
> I'm not exactly following how the tree is organized.  If there are N
> candidates and every voter ranks all candidates, then the biggest N-1 size
> faction will be the one that omits the candidate who is ranked last by the
> most voters, right?  Can't you apply that recursively to build the tree?
>

But wouldn't you prefer to find the biggest faction of a size around N/2? I
must admit, I'm also confused. It's easy with toy examples, but I can't
understand what Forest means for a broad set of candidates.

Here's one rule that might work: to divide a coalition, take the broadest
(most candidates) strict sub-coalition that is larger (more voters) than any
strict sub-coalition which is as broad or broader. That will be N-1 in a
non-partisan, clone-free election, but I think it will still find any
natural coalitions.

JQ
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