Okay, kiddo! Do you like playing games? Let's say you're playing a game against your friend, and you both want to win. You both try to make the best move possible, but sometimes you can't decide which move to make because there are too many options.
That's where the minimax strategy comes in. It's a way to decide what move to make by looking at all the possible outcomes of the game. Basically, you think about what your friend might do in response to your move, and then what you can do in response to their move, and so on. You think ahead several moves like this, and then you pick the move that leads to the best possible outcome for you, even if your friend tries to make it as bad as possible for you.
Now, let's say you and your friend are deciding which movie to watch. You each have a list of movies, and you rank them in order from most to least favorite. But you might have different tastes, so you might not agree on which movie is the best. That's where Condorcet comes in.
Condorcet is a way to figure out which movie is the best based on everyone's preferences. It works by comparing each movie to every other movie, and seeing which one is preferred more often. For example, if more people would rather watch Movie A than Movie B, and more people would rather watch Movie B than Movie C, then Movie A is the "Condorcet winner" - the movie that is preferred overall.
But what if there isn't a clear winner? That's where the minimax Condorcet strategy comes in. It combines the two ideas we talked about earlier - minimax and Condorcet - to find the best movie even when everyone has different preferences.
So, let's say there are three movies - Movie A, Movie B, and Movie C - and three people who are choosing between them. Each person has their own ranking of the movies, which might look like this:
Person 1: A>B>C
Person 2: B>C>A
Person 3: C>A>B
To use the minimax Condorcet strategy, we first compare each movie to every other movie, like this:
A vs B: 2 people prefer A, 1 person prefers B
A vs C: 1 person prefers A, 2 people prefer C
B vs C: 2 people prefer B, 1 person prefers C
Based on this, there isn't a clear Condorcet winner - each movie has one matchup that it wins, and one that it loses. But we can still use the minimax strategy to find the best movie for everyone.
We do this by looking at each movie's "worst-case scenario" - the matchup in which it does the worst. For example, Movie A's worst-case scenario is when it goes up against Movie B, because only one person prefers it in that matchup. So we can assign Movie A a "score" of 1 (the number of people who prefer it in its worst-case scenario).
We do this for each movie, and then we pick the movie with the highest score as the best overall. In this case, Movie B has the highest score (2 people prefer it in its worst-case scenario), so it's the minimax Condorcet winner.
So there you have it - by combining the minimax and Condorcet strategies, we can find the best movie (or game, or anything else) even when everyone has different preferences. Pretty cool, huh?