Show HN: Antimander – Optimize Congressional Districts with Genetic Algorithms
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: Show HN: Antimander – Optimize Congressional Districts with Genetic Algorithms
#2On Android and Chrome, I can't read the page. The graphic takes up half the screen and the text underneath is barely visible.
Re: Show HN: Antimander – Optimize Congressional Districts with Genetic Algorithms
#3This is really well done! Do you have analysis of what this would do nationwide or across multiple states? Optimizing for competitiveness is a metric I hadn’t considered but seems particularly valuable especially towards increasing voter turnout.
Re: Show HN: Antimander – Optimize Congressional Districts with Genetic Algorithms
#4Gerrymandering is a danger to democracy and it is great that researchers shine light on the different trade-offs of districting criteria.
This website seems like a great demonstration of the fairness and competitiveness trade-offs.
Re: Show HN: Antimander – Optimize Congressional Districts with Genetic Algorithms
#5On Android and Chrome, I can't read the page. The graphic takes up half the screen and the text underneath is barely visible.
For me also.
Re: Show HN: Antimander – Optimize Congressional Districts with Genetic Algorithms
#6>Some interesting patterns emerge, such as how with you can have compact and republican-biased but not compact and democrat-biased maps for some numbers of cities. This is a direct result of one party being forced into a small geographic area (cities).
That's quite an interesting finding. I always understood that gerrymandeting is bad because the artificially winning parties get congressmen that are not representative of their districts. This guy uses "competitiveness" as a property worth optimizing for, achieving exactly that.
Re: Show HN: Antimander – Optimize Congressional Districts with Genetic Algorithms
#7This is really well done! Do you have analysis of what this would do nationwide or across multiple states? Optimizing for competitiveness is a metric I hadn’t considered but seems particularly valuable especially towards increasing voter turnout.
How is it valuable? Having a "red" or "blue" district means the congressman is somebody most people can get behind, "our guy in the parliament".
Being around 50% gives you a compromise that nobody trusts and nobody feels the stake in their country.
Re: Show HN: Antimander – Optimize Congressional Districts with Genetic Algorithms
#8Interesting. GA's have some interesting use cases. We used a GA to optimize assignment of work crews to areas as part of a scheduling optimization, and achieved significant benefits
Steve
Re: Show HN: Antimander – Optimize Congressional Districts with Genetic Algorithms
#9Interesting to note that the very same tool can be used to optimize the 'worst' maps as well.
Re: Show HN: Antimander – Optimize Congressional Districts with Genetic Algorithms
#10Along the same thread, genetic algorithms have been used to evaluate fair land allocation in Brazil [1], which have also historically been done by hand. I agree with another user that pointed out the very same tools can be used to gerrymander even more effectively than those districts are currently, perhaps in less obvious ways, without the oddly shaped borders that stretch wildy from place to place. It would be important not to have this occur behind closed doors but left open to scrutiny where the fitness function and biases are in full view.
[1] https://www.lume.ufrgs.br/bitstream/handle/10183/174950/0010...