Crazy Voting

Started: 2004-05-13 23:34:57

Submitted: 2004-05-13 23:52:37

Visibility: World-readable

In the spirit of all good Gatherings, I made another handful of improvements to our standard movie voting scheme. Previous votes involved displaying the entire massed movie collection of all present (the pre-nomination), giving everyone involved the ability to nominate two movies, and the creation of a spreadsheet giving each person the opportunity to vote for the movies, spreading out his or her votes across all of the movies available. In September, I pioneered a normalization scheme, which made it possible for each voter to pick arbitrary numbers, which would be normalized so that each person had 100% of his or her vote to distribute. This time I included blind ballots (each voter had his or her own tab, to prevent the last voter from having too much influence, and added the ability to cast negative votes for movies. The new scheme uses the total of the absolute value each vote for the normalization; if a voter voted 50% on one movie, 25% on another movie, and -25% on a third, the absolute value of each percentage would add up to 100%. We also watched trailers for a number of the movies as we saw fit in some attempt to enhance our voting ability.

Future enhancements may include web-based voting, to avoid the bottleneck of everyone sitting, in sequence, at Ziyal. I resisted the idea at first until it occurred to me that I don't have to over-engineer everything I do; text files should work just fine instead of a heavy database backend.

Right now we're watching Master and Commander, our top-rated choice, with 43% of the vote. Kiesa and I just saw it a week or two ago, so we're sitting out this time; she's watching The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen on Ziyal, and I'm playing with our voting scheme on Elssbett, watching the movie in the background.

Since I know most of you are curious, the spreadsheet is available here.