[EM] A computationally feasible method

[Brian Olson]

On Aug 31, 2008, at 8:25 AM, Raph Frank wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 5:46 PM, Juho <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk> 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 SETI at Home like effort to find the 'true' best
> arrangement (or maybe both party's supporters doing their own version)
> Democrats at Home and Republicans at Home :)

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.