9,467 research outputs found
The Complexity of Power-Index Comparison
We study the complexity of the following problem: Given two weighted voting
games G' and G'' that each contain a player p, in which of these games is p's
power index value higher? We study this problem with respect to both the
Shapley-Shubik power index [SS54] and the Banzhaf power index [Ban65,DS79]. Our
main result is that for both of these power indices the problem is complete for
probabilistic polynomial time (i.e., is PP-complete). We apply our results to
partially resolve some recently proposed problems regarding the complexity of
weighted voting games. We also study the complexity of the raw Shapley-Shubik
power index. Deng and Papadimitriou [DP94] showed that the raw Shapley-Shubik
power index is #P-metric-complete. We strengthen this by showing that the raw
Shapley-Shubik power index is many-one complete for #P. And our strengthening
cannot possibly be further improved to parsimonious completeness, since we
observe that, in contrast with the raw Banzhaf power index, the raw
Shapley-Shubik power index is not #P-parsimonious-complete.Comment: 12 page
Three Puzzles on Mathematics, Computation, and Games
In this lecture I will talk about three mathematical puzzles involving
mathematics and computation that have preoccupied me over the years. The first
puzzle is to understand the amazing success of the simplex algorithm for linear
programming. The second puzzle is about errors made when votes are counted
during elections. The third puzzle is: are quantum computers possible?Comment: ICM 2018 plenary lecture, Rio de Janeiro, 36 pages, 7 Figure
Memory-Based Learning: Using Similarity for Smoothing
This paper analyses the relation between the use of similarity in
Memory-Based Learning and the notion of backed-off smoothing in statistical
language modeling. We show that the two approaches are closely related, and we
argue that feature weighting methods in the Memory-Based paradigm can offer the
advantage of automatically specifying a suitable domain-specific hierarchy
between most specific and most general conditioning information without the
need for a large number of parameters. We report two applications of this
approach: PP-attachment and POS-tagging. Our method achieves state-of-the-art
performance in both domains, and allows the easy integration of diverse
information sources, such as rich lexical representations.Comment: 8 pages, uses aclap.sty, To appear in Proc. ACL/EACL 9
Manipulating the Quota in Weighted Voting Games
Weighted voting games provide a popular model of decision making in multiagent systems. Such games are described by a set of players, a list of players' weights, and a quota; a coalition of the players is said to be winning if the total weight of its members meets or exceeds the quota. The power of a player in such games is traditionally identified with her Shapley--Shubik index or her Banzhaf index, two classical power measures that reflect the player's marginal contributions under different coalition formation scenarios. In this paper, we investigate by how much the central authority can change a player's power, as measured by these indices, by modifying the quota. We provide tight upper and lower bounds on the changes in the individual player's power that can result from a change in quota. We also study how the choice of quota can affect the relative power of the players. From the algorithmic perspective, we provide an efficient algorithm for determining whether there is a value of the quota that makes a given player a {\em dummy}, i.e., reduces his power (as measured by both indices) to 0. On the other hand, we show that checking which of the two values of the quota makes this player more powerful is computationally hard, namely, complete for the complexity class PP, which is believed to be significantly more powerful than NP
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