On 3/4/12 5:44 PM, Warren Smith wrote:
I might try to say all this in a more friendly way than Warren does, but he is 100% right about all the technical issues here. This is basic computer science. Nothing fancy and no judgment calls are involved.On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 3:44 PM, Richard Fobes <[email protected]> wrote:Finally, after reading the articles cited by Warren Smith (listed at the bottom of this reply) plus some related articles, I can reply to his insistence that Condorcet-Kemeny calculations take too long to calculate. Also, this reply addresses the same claim that appears in Wikipedia both in the "Kemeny-Young method" article and in the comparison table within the Wikipedia "Voting systems" article (in the "polynomial time" column that Markus Schulze added).One source of confusion is that Warren, and perhaps others, regard the Condorcet-Kemeny problem as a "decision problem" that only has a "yes" or "no" answer. This view is suggested by Warren's reference (below and in other messages) to the problem as being NP-complete, which only applies to decision problems. Although it is possible to formulate a decision problem based on one or more specified characteristics of the Condorcet-Kemeny method, that is a different problem than the Condorcet-Kemeny problem.--the optimization problem is at least as hard as the decision problem.You are erroneously creating the impression I somehow was unaware of this, or that you somehow have here got some new insight. Neither is true.
-- Andrew
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