The central problem in this work is to compute a ranking of a set of elements
which is "closest to" a given set of input rankings of the elements. We define
"closest to" in an established way as having the minimum sum of Kendall-Tau
distances to each input ranking. Unfortunately, the resulting problem Kemeny
consensus is NP-hard for instances with n input rankings, n being an even
integer greater than three. Nevertheless this problem plays a central role in
many rank aggregation problems.