Talk:Smith criterion

Smith set ranking
Do all Smith-efficient methods produce Smith set rankings of the candidates for their orders of finish? BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 16:35, 22 February 2020 (UTC)


 * That's really two questions. The first is "is it possible to create a Smith-efficient method that doesn't rank them in this way?", and the second is "do all publicly known/nonpathological methods rank them in this way?". The answer to the first is yes (e.g. Smith//IRV and then rank the rest of the candidates randomly below the candidates in the Smith set). The former is, I think, "most but not all". The intuitive reason is that if you make a method that embodies Smith-compatible logic, then the path of least resistance for most such simple types of logic is to extend to a full Smith ranking. Schulze is like this, for instance. But composed methods (Smith,Minmax) and methods that glue together sufficiently different logic (BTR-STV, Benham) are not necessarily so. Kristomun (talk) 19:39, 22 February 2020 (UTC)


 * In general, for questions like "does X imply Y?", a good first strategy is to try to be a maximally malicious genie and try to find an example where X does not imply Y. You only need one counterexample to show that X doesn't imply Y. Proving that something is the case is often much harder than proving that it isn't. Kristomun (talk) 20:02, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Smith efficient
Is "Smith efficient" the term of art that y'all use when you're talking about methods in academic settings? It seems like we should at least have a Smith efficient redirect point to this article, since that seems like an efficient way of referring to this criterion (so to speak). -- RobLa (talk) 17:37, 22 May 2020 (UTC)


 * It seems to be a somewhat frequent term on EM. See, for instance, this post: Kristomun (talk) 18:42, 22 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Already done at Smith-efficient. BetterVotingAdvocacy (talk) 21:50, 22 May 2020 (UTC)