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Computational Social Choice
Computational social choice is a field at the intersection of social choice theory, theoretical computer science, and the analysis of multi-agent systems. It consists of the analysis of problems arising from the aggregation of preferences of a group of agents from a computational perspective. In particular, computational social choice is concerned with the efficient computation of outcomes of voting rules, with the computational complexity of various forms of manipulation, and issues arising from the problem of representing and eliciting preferences in combinatorial settings. Winner determination The usefulness of a particular voting system can be severely limited if it takes a very long time to calculate the winner of an election. Therefore, it is important to design fast algorithms that can evaluate a voting rule when given ballots as input. As is common in computational complexity theory, an algorithm is thought to be efficient if it takes polynomial time. Many popular votin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Social Choice Theory
Social choice theory or social choice is a theoretical framework for analysis of combining individual opinions, preferences, interests, or welfares to reach a ''collective decision'' or ''social welfare'' in some sense.Amartya Sen (2008). "Social Choice,". ''The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics'', 2nd EditionAbstract & TOC./ref> Whereas choice theory is concerned with individuals making choices based on their preferences, social choice theory is concerned with how to translate the preferences of individuals into the preferences of a group. A non-theoretical example of a collective decision is enacting a law or set of laws under a constitution. Another example is voting, where individual preferences over candidates are collected to elect a person that best represents the group's preferences. Social choice blends elements of welfare economics and public choice theory. It is methodologically individualistic, in that it aggregates preferences and behaviors of individual member ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Majority
A majority, also called a simple majority or absolute majority to distinguish it from #Related terms, related terms, is more than half of the total.Dictionary definitions of ''majority'' aMerriam-Webster Oxford English Dictionary an Cambridge English Dictionary It is a subset of a Set (mathematics), set consisting of more than ha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tournament (graph Theory)
A tournament is a directed graph (digraph) obtained by assigning a direction for each edge in an undirected complete graph. That is, it is an orientation of a complete graph, or equivalently a directed graph in which every pair of distinct vertices is connected by a directed edge (often, called an arc) with any one of the two possible orientations. Many of the important properties of tournaments were first investigated by H. G. Landau in to model dominance relations in flocks of chickens. Current applications of tournaments include the study of voting theory and social choice theory among other things. The name ''tournament'' originates from such a graph's interpretation as the outcome of a round-robin tournament in which every player encounters every other player exactly once, and in which no draws occur. In the tournament digraph, the vertices correspond to the players. The edge between each pair of players is oriented from the winner to the loser. If player a beats player b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tournament Solution
A tournament solution is a function that maps an oriented complete graph to a nonempty subset of its vertices. It can informally be thought of as a way to find the "best" alternatives among all of the alternatives that are "competing" against each other in the tournament. Tournament solutions originate from social choice theory, but have also been considered in sports competition, game theory, multi-criteria decision analysis, biology, webpage ranking, and dueling bandit problems. In the context of social choice theory, tournament solutions are closely related to Fishburn's C1 social choice functions, and thus seek to show who the best candidates are among all candidates. Definition A tournament (graph) T is a tuple (A,\succ) where A is a set of vertices (called ''alternatives'') and \succ is a connex and asymmetric binary relation over the vertices. In social choice theory, the binary relation typically represents the pairwise majority comparison between alternatives. A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Worst-case Execution Time
The worst-case execution time (WCET) of a computational task is the maximum length of time the task could take to execute on a specific hardware platform. What it is used for Worst case execution time is typically used in reliable real-time systems, where understanding the worst case timing behaviour of software is important for reliability or correct functional behaviour. As an example, a computer system that controls the behaviour of an engine in a vehicle might need to respond to inputs within a specific amount of time. One component that makes up the response time is the time spent executing the software – hence if the software worst case execution time can be determined, then the designer of the system can use this with other techniques such as schedulability analysis to ensure that the system responds fast enough. While WCET is potentially applicable to many real-time systems, in practice an assurance of WCET is mainly used by real-time systems that are related to hig ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
P Versus NP Problem
The P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in theoretical computer science. In informal terms, it asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified can also be quickly solved. The informal term ''quickly'', used above, means the existence of an algorithm solving the task that runs in polynomial time, such that the time to complete the task varies as a polynomial function on the size of the input to the algorithm (as opposed to, say, exponential time). The general class of questions for which some algorithm can provide an answer in polynomial time is " P" or "class P". For some questions, there is no known way to find an answer quickly, but if one is provided with information showing what the answer is, it is possible to verify the answer quickly. The class of questions for which an answer can be ''verified'' in polynomial time is NP, which stands for "nondeterministic polynomial time".A nondeterministic Turing machine can move to a state that is not ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Single Transferable Vote
Single transferable vote (STV) is a multi-winner electoral system in which voters cast a single vote in the form of a ranked-choice ballot. Voters have the option to rank candidates, and their vote may be transferred according to alternate preferences if their preferred candidate is eliminated, so that their vote is used to elect someone they prefer over others in the running. STV aims to approach proportional representation based on votes cast in the district where it is used, so that each vote is worth about the same as another. Under STV, no one party or voting bloc can take all the seats in a district unless the number of seats in the district is very small or almost all the votes cast are cast for one party's candidates (which is seldom the case). This makes it different from other district voting systems. In majoritarian/plurality systems such as first-past-the-post (FPTP), instant-runoff voting (IRV; also known as the alternative vote), block voting, and ranked-vote ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
NP-completeness
In computational complexity theory, a problem is NP-complete when: # it is a problem for which the correctness of each solution can be verified quickly (namely, in polynomial time) and a brute-force search algorithm can find a solution by trying all possible solutions. # the problem can be used to simulate every other problem for which we can verify quickly that a solution is correct. In this sense, NP-complete problems are the hardest of the problems to which solutions can be verified quickly. If we could find solutions of some NP-complete problem quickly, we could quickly find the solutions of every other problem to which a given solution can be easily verified. The name "NP-complete" is short for "nondeterministic polynomial-time complete". In this name, "nondeterministic" refers to nondeterministic Turing machines, a way of mathematically formalizing the idea of a brute-force search algorithm. Polynomial time refers to an amount of time that is considered "quick" for a deter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Copeland's Method
Copeland's method is a ranked voting method based on a scoring system of pairwise "wins", "losses", and "ties". The method has a long history: * Ramon Llull described the system in 1299, so it is sometimes referred to as "Llull's method" * The Marquis de Condorcet described a similar system in the 1780s, so the method could be referred to as "Condorcet's method", but instead other systems were subsequently devised that choose the Condorcet winner. * Arthur Herbert Copeland described the system in the 1950s, so it has been frequently been called "Copeland's method". (unpublished). Each voter is asked to rank candidates in order of preference. A candidate A is said to have majority preference over another candidate B if more voters prefer A to B than prefer B to A; if the numbers are equal then there is a preference tie. The Copeland score for a candidate is the number of other candidates over whom they have a majority preference ''plus'' half the number of candidates with whom t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gibbard–Satterthwaite Theorem
In social choice theory, the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem is a result published independently by philosopher Allan Gibbard in 1973 and economist Mark Satterthwaite in 1975. It deals with deterministic ordinal electoral systems that choose a single winner. It states that for every voting rule, one of the following three things must hold: # The rule is dictatorial, i.e. there exists a distinguished voter who can choose the winner; or # The rule limits the possible outcomes to two alternatives only; or # The rule is susceptible to tactical voting: in certain conditions, a voter's sincere ballot may not best defend their opinion. While the scope of this theorem is limited to ordinal voting, Gibbard's theorem is more general, in that it deals with processes of collective decision that may not be ordinal: for example, voting systems where voters assign grades to candidates. Gibbard's 1978 theorem and Hylland's theorem are even more general and extend these results to non-determini ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parameterized Complexity
In computer science, parameterized complexity is a branch of computational complexity theory that focuses on classifying computational problems according to their inherent difficulty with respect to ''multiple'' parameters of the input or output. The complexity of a problem is then measured as a function of those parameters. This allows the classification of NP-hard problems on a finer scale than in the classical setting, where the complexity of a problem is only measured as a function of the number of bits in the input. The first systematic work on parameterized complexity was done by . Under the assumption that P ≠ NP, there exist many natural problems that require superpolynomial running time when complexity is measured in terms of the input size only, but that are computable in a time that is polynomial in the input size and exponential or worse in a parameter . Hence, if is fixed at a small value and the growth of the function over is relatively small then such p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
