On Aug 31, 2008, at 8:25 AM, Raph Frank wrote:
On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 5:46 PM, Juho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
To gain even
better trust that this set is the best one one could publish the
best found
set and then wait for a week and allow other interested parties to
seek for
even better sets. Maybe different parties or candidates try to find
alternatives where they would do better. If nothing is found then
the first
found set is declared elected.
Brian Olson suggests this approach for his anti-gerrymandering
proposals.
http://bolson.org/dist/USIRA.html
and
http://bolson.org/dist/
Ofc, he doesn't define "geographic centers of the districts", which
presumably means the centre of gravity of the district.
I'm pretty sure I want the average point of the land area, but yes,
there are different ways to count 'center' or 'middle' and there may
be some debate between them.
Maybe it would be better to define the centre of the district as the
average position of all the people in the district.
That's an obvious alternative, and it results in different shaped
mappings when used, and it's not obvious which way is better, but I'm
still leaning towards average distance per person to land-area-center
rather than population-center. I think population center could be more
likely to wind up with a million people right at center, and a few
people flung off far away, but land-area-center is less likely for
that to happen.
One possible problem is that it would allow people with very powerful
computers to gain an advantage. The Republicans and the Democrats
would probably end up being favoured.
However, the advantage is likely to be slight. Also, it could end up
that there was a [EMAIL PROTECTED] like effort to find the 'true' best
arrangement (or maybe both party's supporters doing their own version)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] :)
Given my anectodal experience with running solvers so far, it'll be
pretty hard to get a good impartial score and also secretly bend the
mapping towards some objective. This is substantially just because
it's hard to get a good impartial score. I think the type of
organization with the biggest chance of affecting the outcomes would
be one with a big server farm: national labs with supercomputer
clusters, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, NSA, etc.
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