Election Manipulation

Carlo Augusto Vitellio (carloaugusto.vitellio@mail.polimi.it) APSC project.

The project consists of the implementation of the election manipulation problem in the framework of unknown preferences. First, it is implemented the actual Social Network Creator and, then, the proper manipulation phase.

For what concerns the creation of the Social Network it is used a plugin architecture for letting the user the choice of what type of Graph to study. In fact, the user may specify in an input-file read at run-time which Graph Creator method to use and to point the corresponding dynamic library to be loaded. Furthermore, the user may choose the way the Network is populated with people. In particular, he/she may decide which distributions are used for generating each Person in the Graph.

The manipulation phase is characterised by a manipulator that exploits an Information cascade for influencing the Voters in the network.

For futher details, please read the report.pdf

Libraries used

• Boost Graph Library

  • Mainly, it was used the template only part of the library. This means that no compilation is needed for most of the code.
  • For implementing the GraphCreatorInputFile class two other libraries were also used. In particular, "boost_graph" and "boost_regex" were used.

  For these reasons, it suggested to install the Boost library following getting_started or look to the section "Installing Boost" below

• MuParser

  For reading and parsing probability distributions from text file. For installing it, follow https://beltoforion.de/en/muparser/building.php

• GetPot

  It is actually a single header file and it has already been included in the include/ExternalUtilities folder

• Some utilities implemented by Prof. Luca Formaggia

  Those utilities have been proposed as examples in his APSC classes at Politecnico di Milano and they are available at https://github.com/pacs-course/pacs-examples

It may also be needed to have installed graphviz.

Once installed both the Boost and MuParser library, the file Makefile.inc should be modified in order to link to the proper folders containing the libraries. In particular, the user should modify the variables ROOT, mkBoostInc, MUPARSER_INC_DIR and MUPARSER_LIB_DIR.

Make instructions

After having modified the variables listed above in the Makefile.inc file, it is possible to build the project.

• With make help the user may see the help of the make
• With make all it is generated a dependency file, dynamic libraries are built and the executable is made
• With make doc documentation is generated via Doxygen

Executable instructions

After having made the executable, it may be asked its help via ./main -h

Installing Boost on Unix variants

This is not intended to replace the Boost Documentation, but it simply tries to help the user.

1. download the library from link
2. In the terminal write
3. tar --bzip2 -xf /path/to/boost_1_77_0.tar.bz2
4. cd /path/to/boost_1_77_0.tar.bz2
5. ./bootstrap.sh --with-libraries=graph,regex

You may need write permission in the directory where you decide to store the library.