Post #2175406
2026-05-01 13:31 UTC
Replies (6)
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@simontatham@hachyderm.io 2026-05-01 13:34
@robinhouston@mathstodon.xyz knockout tournament.
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@mjd@mathstodon.xyz 2026-05-01 13:34
@robinhouston@mathstodon.xyz There are other polling services. Or you could approach it like this: Of course your favorite platonic solid is the dodecahedron, but what's your second favorite?
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@tpfto@mathstodon.xyz 2026-05-01 13:36
@robinhouston@mathstodon.xyz how about the following alternative: make this a thread, with one toot for each Platonic solid (probably set to "Quiet public"), and each favorite counts as a vote? Problem with this is people can star more than one toot, so how you deal with dupes is up to you.
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@mjd@mathstodon.xyz 2026-05-01 13:37
@robinhouston@mathstodon.xyz Now you have me interested in a related problem. Suppose you have a group of people, each of whom has a secret preference list of five things. You ask the group ten questions of the form "do you prefer A, or B?" and get back the aggregate totals. From this information, what can you infer about the distribution of the 120 possible preference lists?
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@OscarCunningham@mathstodon.xyz 2026-05-01 14:12
@robinhouston@mathstodon.xyz The poll shows the total number of respondents. So you get five numbers and you want to know five numbers. Just do linear algebra.
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@valhalla@social.gl-como.it 2026-05-01 16:15
@robinhouston@mathstodon.xyz there is just *one* right way to do it :D civs1.civs.us/ or a similar service (it was one of the first results of an internet search, I don't know whether it's a *good* one