now as one...
In the spirit of Progress and Ideas, I decided to kick off this party by running our lists through a ranked-ballot election calculator to determine what is the best movie of 2006 according to a few jews, an indian guy and two really tall guys.
Watch this Educational and Informative flash animation to learn about ranked-ballot voting and to find out why we will live in a Fascist Police State until we get some real election reform.
Anyway, I used this impressive javascript ranked-ballot calculator to calculate winner. I used the input below:
1:united>prop>oldjoy>enfant>battle>miami>tzameti>marie>apoc>mr
1:ddj>united>letters>whywe>enfant>mutual>borat>queen>children>puffy
1:children>enfant>united>queen>volver>letters>iraq>borat>mutual>departed
1:departed>united>inside>children>dave>prestige>wordplay>queen
I had to leave nate and nihal out for now because they refused to follow to the rules and rank their preferences. The results may also be slightly skewed by my only ranking 7.5 movies. If nate and nihal get their acts together, I will incorporate their lists.
The calculation methods of Baldwin, Black, Borda, Copeland, Dodgson, Nanson, Raynaud, Schulze, Simpson, Small, Tideman and Condorcet were unanimous. The winner was:
United 93
I then removed United 93 from the running, and ran the script again. The results were disputed:
Children of Men (Baldwin, Copeland, Dodgson, Nanson, Raynaud, Schulze, Simpson, Small and Tideman)
L'Enfant (Black and Borda)
Condorcet pulled a tie. The thing is, all the methodologies that picked Children of Men had to pick a random ballot to act as the tie-breaking vote. However, my lay-analysis is that since Children of Men appears on more ballots (regardless of its position) it has a better chance of winning in the random ballot selection.
So, Although it was very close, everybody knows ties are for losers. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say Children of Men has the slightest edge, with L'Enfant following close behind. Thus, I removed both movies from the next round, and again the results were unanimous:
The Queen
Removing The Queen from the running produced the most disputed results yet:
Borat (Copeland* and Small*)
The Departed (Black and Borda)
Volver (Baldwin*, Dodgson*, Nanson*, Raynaud*, Schulze*, Simpson* and Tideman*)
Again, all of the starred methodologies required a random ballot as a tie-breaker. Just going by the number of methodologies in support, we get Volver taking 4th. Although both The Departed and Borat have two methodologies representin', The Departed has two that didn't require a random ballot selection, so I'm giving Marty 5th. That gives us the...
THE TOP 6 MOVIES OF 2006 ACCORDING TO ALGORITHMS NO-ONE UNDERSTANDS
1. United 93
2. Children of Men
3. L'Enfant
4. Volver
5. The Departed
6. Borat
Interestingly enough, only lefko's ballot includes all of the top six, and then only if you count all 15 of the movies he lists. I, for one, welcome our mechanical overlords and think they have pretty good taste in movies.
A Real Nerd
Ben, you just made this column geeky in a completely new and interesting way. God bless you.
problems
as it turns out, that final round of calculations is deceptive. the choice of the tie-breaking ballot turns out to have tremendous effect. the script chooses one random ballot as the tie-breaking ballot, but the tie-breaker must rank EVERY movie under consideration. So the script very thoughtfully appends the rest of the movies in alphabetical order to the end of the chosen ballot. but even then it cannot accommodate equal ranking of those extras, so they are RANKED in alphabetical order (after the last movie explictly ranked by the voter). So, since the ballots are all pretty different, the letter my keyword for a movie (i.e. children of men = children) can have a considerable effect on the outcome. In a second run of the script (with a different random tie-breaker), for example, Letters from Iwo Jima came up as the choice of EVERY method, which wasn't even present in the first run! So, sadly, we should probably disregard the last three movies on the Robot King's top six, at least until nate and nihal starting fighting on the side of freedom and give us some rankings.
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