Universal Voting Protocol Tweaks to Make Manipulation Hard

Voting is a general method for preference aggregation in multiagent settings, but seminal results have shown that all (nondictatorial) voting protocols are manipulable. One could try to avoid manipulation by using voting protocols where determining a beneficial manipulation is hard computationally. A number of recent papers study the complexity of manipulating existing protocols. This paper is the first work to take the next step of designing new protocols that are especially hard to manipulate. Rather than designing these new protocols from scratch, we instead show how to tweak existing protocols to make manipulation hard, while leaving much of the original nature of the protocol intact. The tweak studied consists of adding one elimination preround to the election. Surprisingly, this extremely simple and universal tweak makes typical protocols hard to manipulate! The protocols become NP-hard, #P-hard, or PSPACE-hard to manipulate, depending on whether the schedule of the preround is determined before the votes are collected, after the votes are collected, or the scheduling and the vote collecting are interleaved, respectively. We prove general sufficient conditions on the protocols for this tweak to introduce the hardness, and show that the most common voting protocols satisfy those conditions. These are the first results in voting settings where manipulation is in a higher complexity class than NP (presuming PSPACE $\neq$ NP)

Numerical Solution of Quantum-Mechanical Pair Equations

We discuss and illustrate the numerical solution of the differential equation satisfied by the first‐order pair functions of Sinanoğlu. An expansion of the pair function in spherical harmonics and the use of finite difference methods convert the differential equation into a set of simultaneous equations. Large systems of such equations can be solved economically. The method is simple and straightforward, and we have applied it to the first‐order pair function for helium with 1 / r_(12) as the perturbation. The results are accurate and encouraging, and since the method is numerical they are indicative of its potential for obtaining atomic‐pair functions in general

Effective theory of excitations in a Feshbach resonant superfluid

A strongly interacting Fermi gas, such as that of cold atoms operative near a Feshbach resonance, is difficult to study by perturbative many-body theory to go beyond mean field approximation. Here I develop an effective field theory for the resonant superfluid based on broken symmetry. The theory retains both fermionic quasiparticles and superfluid phonons, the interaction between them being derived non-perturbatively. The theory converges and can be improved order by order, in a manner governed by a low energy expansion rather than by coupling constant. I apply the effective theory to calculate the specific heat and propose a mechanism of understanding the empirical power law of energy versus temperature recently measured in a heat capacity experiment.Comment: 4+ pages, 1 figure; Added references, corrected and clarified minor statements (v.2