Continuous Pairwise Comparisons

Issue title: Theory and Practice of Pairwise Comparisons

Guest editors: Ryszard Janicki and Konrad Kułakowski

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Saaty, Thomas L.^*

Affiliations: Distinguished University Professor, University of Pittsburgh, USA. [email protected]

Correspondence: [*] Address for correspondence: Distinguished University Professor, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Abstract: One often assumes that comparisons are discrete and carried out in a matrix of numbers. However, our eyes and other senses perform comparisons in a continuous way by making many simultaneously. Here the mathematics of pairwise comparisons is generalized to the continuous case. It is more likely that in evolution, little creatures had and now still have a “feeling” about the environment in which they find themselves by sensing many things at once. Through evolution, sensing has been transformed to thinking and to discrete comparisons. This paper presents some material from other works written about continuous comparisons.

Keywords: Pairwise comparisons, continuous comparisons, systems of equations, Fredholm’s equation of the second kind, eigenvectors and eigenfunctions

DOI: 10.3233/FI-2016-1330

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 144, no. 3-4, pp. 213-221, 2016