Algorithms for helping humans choose (kitten war, for instance)

Question

Ok, I'm facing an imminent addition to my family, and working through choice of names.

I've considered writing software to display names and force me to choose which I like better, similar to kitten war.

Once I've got a huge graph, though, I don't know how to process it, especially if there are cycles. for instance, I like mike better than sam, sam better than jared, jared better than mike - it doesn't make sense to simply assign votes and count them (which is what I think kitten war does). Further, I may one day get mike vs jared and vote one way, but vote differently if I get it on another day.

So:

• Once you have the data, how to process the graph and rank the names?

Alternately:

• What other useful algorithms might be used to make choices (say vehicle style, if you're looking for a new car)?

-Adam

Answer 1

You might like to check out the answers to a question I asked a while back: How to rank a million images with a crowdsourced sort - there were some good suggestions on how to process the results of lots of comparison operations to arrive at a ranking.