1. See N. Boccara, Modeling complex Systems, Springer, New York, 2004, p. 3.
2. Taken from the UK newspaper The Guardian on 5 May 2005, online version.
3. See news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4483817.stm
4. See www.eurovision.tv/english/index.htm which is the official Eurovision website. Also see the comprehensive unofficial website of G. Harrison www.eurovisionsong.info/. The data on past voting, which is the subject of the present study, is freely available from either source.
5. Our experience is that there are many people who consider the songs in the Eurovision Song Contest to be all equally ‘nice’—or all equally bad. There are also many people who believe the assignment of points by many countries to be arbitrary (but not necessarily random) since the points awarded seem unrelated to the song's perceived intrinsic value. The frequent appearance of songs with meaningless titles—such as Ding Dinge Dong, La La La and Boom Bang-A-Bang—obviously does little to dissuade such opinions, particularly given that all three of these songs are actual past winners.