相关论文: Physics peeks into the ballot box

Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…

In the US 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama was elected as the 44th president of United States, winning the 53% of popular votes and 68% of electoral votes; in the election of 2000, Al Gore lost the election receiving 49 % of…

To many statisticians and citizens, the outcome of the most recent U.S. presidential election represents a failure of data-driven methods on the grandest scale. This impression has led to much debate and discussion about how the election…

We present a generic way of thinking about time machines from the view of a far away observer. In this model the universe consists of three (or more) regions: One containing the entrance of the time machine, another the exit and the…

A universal formula is shown to predict the dynamics of public opinion including eventual sudden and unexpected outbreaks of minority opinions within a generic parameter space of five dimensions. The formula is obtained combining and…

Elections play a fundamental role in democratic societies, however they are often characterized by unexpected results. Here we discuss an election campaign model inspired by the compartmental epidemiology, and we show that the model…

There are many factors that can influence the outcome of an election. We here identify two dominant effects that can affect the votes obtained by a candidate, namely, the Majority Effect and the Media Effect. We mimic these two effects in a…

U.S. presidential elections are decided by the Electoral College, established in 1789, and designed to mitigate potential risks arising from the collusion of large groups of citizens. A statewide winner-take-all popular voting system for…

One of the most widely known and important applications of probability and statistics is scientific polling to forecast election results. In 1936, Gallup predicted correctly the victory of Roosevelt over Landon in the US presidential…

The "anomalous" values of C. Ferrie and J. Combes in Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 120404 (2014) say nothing about quantum - or even classical - physics. They are not analogues of the weak values that emerge when we describe the quantum world via…

Our main contribution is the introduction of the map of elections framework. A map of elections consists of three main elements: (1) a dataset of elections (i.e., collections of ordinal votes over given sets of candidates), (2) a way of…

The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…

The vacuum is full of virtual particles which exist for short moments of time. In this paper we construct a chaotic model of vacuum fluctuations associated with a fundamental entropic field that generates an arrow of time. The dynamics can…

In a party-based election system, the voters are grouped into parties and all voters of a party are assumed to vote according to the party preferences over the candidates. Hence, once the party preferences are declared the outcome of the…

Arrow's Theorem concerns a fundamental problem in social choice theory: given the individual preferences of members of a group, how can they be aggregated to form rational group preferences? Arrow showed that in an election between three or…

In a country with many elections, it may prove economically expedient to hold multiple elections simultaneously on a common polling date. We show that in a polarized society, in which each voter has a preferred party, an increase in the…

A method for studying exact properties of a class of {\it inhomogeneous} stochastic many-body systems is developed and presented in the framework of a voter model perturbed by the presence of a ``zealot'', an individual allowed to favour an…

Consider elections where the set of candidates is partitioned into parties, and each party must nominate exactly one candidate. The Possible President problem asks whether some candidate of a given party can become the winner of the…

We analyze the notion that physical theories are quantitative and testable by observations in experiments. This leads us to propose a new, Bayesian, interpretation of probabilities in physics that unifies their current use in classical…

Manipulation is a problem of fundamental importance in the context of voting in which the voters exercise their votes strategically instead of voting honestly to prevent selection of an alternative that is less preferred. The…