Entries from February 2010

February 22, 2010

Two Interesting Observations about Voting I Hadn’t Seen Until Recently

By “voting”, I mean the following general problem:  Suppose there are candidates and voters.  Each voter produces a total ordering of all candidates.  A voting procedure is a function which takes as input all orderings, and produces an output ranking of all candidates.  Arrow’s impossibility theorem states that there is really no satisfactory voting procedure [...]

February 17, 2010

Quantish Physics: A Discrete Model of Quantum Physics

In the book Good and Real, author Gary Drescher, who received his PhD from MIT’s AI lab, defends the view that determinism is a consistent and coherent view of the world.   In doing so, he enters many different arenas: ethics, decision theory, and physics. In his chapter on quantum mechanics, he defends the “many-worlds” interpretation [...]