by Carsten Peust (2010)
(preliminary Beta version)
(Freeware / Open Source)[1]
This tool helps you to make decisions of any kind, such as decisions about which camera to buy, where to eat out tonight, or whom to marry, to mention only a few possibilities. The input must, of course, come from yourself, namely the information what is really important to you. But this tool splits the decision task into a sequence of smaller steps which are easier for you to evaluate, while the arithmetical combination of these steps, a task which the human mind is not well adapted to solve, is done by the program.
Details: The algorithm assumes that your final evaluation of a decision option will be a linear combination of the evaluation of the single criteria. This is probably correct for most normal decisions. A more exotic scenario not tackled by this program would be that you have two alternative criteria, you require at least one of them to be good, but you do not consider it an additional benefit when both of them are good. If this should be the case, you may recombine both criteria into one so that this anomaly disappears. For the selection of your criteria, it is generally advisable to express them in a way that they are independent, which also makes it easier for you to estimate their relative weights. For example, do not define criterion A 'the camera should have a high resolution' and criterion B 'the camera should be good in general' (where B includes A), but instead define criteria such as A 'the camera should have a high resolution' and B 'the camera should have a good optical zoom' (which are independent).
Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any wrong decisions you may make after having used this tool, nor for any other damage you might experience by using this tool. View this tool only as an aid and use good judgement.
[1] The code is to be found as JavaScript in the source of this html page.