Clone independence — can running copies of yourself help you win?¶
Ranked Robin's headline defense: adding near-identical candidates ("clones") shouldn't change who wins. These cases probe it — first the LH-only pair that shows the clones reshaping the finalist set, then the BV-backed pair (BV2142/BV2143) that pinned the same election on a live BetterVoting count. Both engines elect C after the cloning; the interesting part is that the clones still changed the outcome, just not in their own faction's favour.
The cases¶
| Case | Page | YAML |
|---|---|---|
| Before cloning: A, B, C tie in a cycle (LH-only) | page | clone_teaming_01_pre.yaml |
| Teaming: A runs clones, and the win goes to C (LH-only) | page | clone_teaming_02_post.yaml |
| BV2142 — clone independence (1/2): a no-Condorcet cycle, where LH and BV part ways | lesson · page | bv2142_4gfwdq_clone_cycle_pre.yaml |
| BV2143 — clone independence (2/2): the clones change the outcome, and hand it to C | lesson · page | bv2143_9pr3wr_teaming_fails.yaml |
Frozen BV exports sit next to their yamls; full audit mirrors in clone_independence_tabulated/. These pages read as an LH-vs-BetterVoting divergence until 2026-08-19, when the engine's tiebreak ladder was corrected: Ranked Robin resolves a two-way tie on the finalists' own head-to-head (its 1st Degree) before it looks at margins over the field (its 2nd Degree), and the engine had only the second. See degrees of ties and RR tiebreak, LH vs BV.