On Tue, Dec 19, 2000 at 09:05:46AM -0600, Norman Petry wrote: > I think it is better if the method described in the constitution is > defined in functional terms, rather than in the form of an algorithm. > Not only is that form of description briefer and easier to understand, > but it allows the bugs in the implementation to be fixed. If every > bug in the algorithm used to implement the voting method requires > a constitutional amendment to change, it's going to be a real PITA > to maintain. For example, the Smith criterion can be unambiguously > stated in one or two sentences. If you want to use Smith as a voting > method, rather than just a criterion the method satisfies (which would > be better, imho), if you define it in the constitution then a later > discovery that your algorithm doesn't actually implement smith could > easily be fixed.
Hmm.. I was trying to match the criteria that the constitution be usable as psuedo code, and I was trying to eliminate ambiguities as concisely as possible, given that constraint. If there's some kind of consensus that I shouldn't use psuedo code that would make it a lot easier on me. ... > However, you can see that writing out this algorithm in the Constitution is > going to be a lot more cumbersome than simply defining what the Smith set > *is* in one or two sentences. Smith set is trivial to define in a about four sentences using transformations on arrays. Here's the concise form: compute matrix of option x beats option y. find transitive closure. add columns, find minimum sum. eliminate options with sum greater than minimum. Eliminating ambiguity in the interpretation of those sentences would bulk them up a bit, but the equivalence still holds. (In the first matrix, 1 indicates that x beats y, 0 indicates not. In the second matrix, 1 indicates that x transitively beats y. The sum corresponding to an option should indicate the number of options which transitively beat it). Please note that a number of the ambiguities in the current constitution result from people treating unfamiliar constraint terminology as psuedo code. I suppose that, since Debian is composed largely of developers, that's to be expected. -- Raul
