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BestThing.info, TheFairest.info, and TheFunniest.info are a trio of side projects to the webcomic xkcd.
They host contests where people vote to select the best choice from a large pool of user-submitted options.
The system behind the sites is fairly simple, and is based
loosely on the idea of the Condorcet criterion for voting systems.
The system gives each one a number based on, out of the things that it has faced, what percentage of them it usua
lly beats. So each one gets the percentage score NumberOfThingsIBeat / (NumberOfThingsIBeat + NumberOfThingsThatBeatMe).
Also, things are barred from the top list until they've been compared to a reasonable percentage of the set.
If there's a Condorcet winner in the set, this method will find it. Since that's unlikely, given the statistical nature, it finds the one that's the "closest" to being a Condorcet winner. One nice thing is that this doesn't really suffer from the bash.org problem that the longer something is on the list, the higher its ranking can go. |