Post #2592396
2026-05-01 13:37 UTC
@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?
Replies (2)
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@simontatham@hachyderm.io 2026-05-01 13:38
@mjd@mathstodon.xyz @robinhouston@mathstodon.xyz … and if you retrieve information about people's full preference list and not just their single favourite, is there even a Condorcet winner?
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@christianp@mathstodon.xyz 2026-05-01 13:41
@mjd@mathstodon.xyz @robinhouston@mathstodon.xyz in practice, when asking this way you often get people with non-transitive preferences, e.g. they prefer B to A, and C to B, but also prefer A to C.