[seanalltogether]

I've been wanting to play with code for awhile to see how effective a "huddle" algorithm might be. The idea being that people with similar interests tend to huddle together into areas of a large city or regions of the state they feel match their lifestyle.

I'm not sure exactly how it would work but I imagine some kind of flood fill where you start with a population center and grow outward from it. Those should fill up quickly and by the end you should have large rural districts to finish off the state.

[specialist]

Huddle? Like the phyles in Stephenson's Diamond Age?

I'm very political, partisan. I'm seeing first hand the rise of interest group organizing as the political parties continue to decline. This sea change is making me very optimistic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyle

The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado http://a.co/gQ7VIS7

[maxerickson]

Effective at what? One potential goal of gerrymandering is packing your opponents into as few districts as possible.

Which is ultimately the problem with algorithmic approaches; "fair" isn't an objective measure.

[specialist]

I'm warming up to the idea of voter efficiency.

And the various form of elections are absolutely more or less fair, eg FPTP vs Approval Voting.

[smelterdemon]

Efficiency gap is a decent objective metric of fairness.

[maxerickson]

It's not an algorithm for drawing districts though, it's a score computed for a given plan.

And it depends on selecting binary sides. How do you objectively deal with a popular moderate?