The goal: determine the winner of an election where every voter ranks all candidates, and the system resolves preferences step by step while avoiding cycles in the resulting graph of pairwise victories.
: If candidate A beats B by 7 votes, and B beats C by 5 votes, but C beats A by 2 votes, a cycle exists (A→B→C→A). Tideman avoids this by skipping the weakest edge in the cycle.
: The problem requires that each pair appears only once, with the winner first. Cs50 Tideman Solution
for (int j = i + 1; j < candidate_count; j++)
After locking, the winner is the candidate with no incoming edges (nobody has locked[j][i] == true for that i ). The goal: determine the winner of an election
if (will_create_cycle(winner, i)) return true;
That’s it. The recursion in creates_cycle handles all chain connections. : The problem requires that each pair appears
: Once a voter’s full ranking is validated, you must update the global preferences[i][j] 2D array. This array tracks how many voters preferred candidate over candidate