alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
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Some mathematicians worked out a way to fairly do districting, similar to having one kid cut the cake and the other kid gets first choice:
"A partisan districting protocol with provably nonpartisan outcomes" by Wesley Pegden, Ariel D. Procaccia, Dingli Yu https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781
There has to be a better way of representing a population than our current system. There is just no way you can represent real, complex, demographics in a fair and proportional way -- there are an unlimited number of ways to categorize people, and by grouping them one way you will often exclude grouping them in other, and perhaps not less significant ways. What you end up with is a very skewed representation of a population that's only bounded to reality through our notions of which category they belong to.
Lovely game! Takes a bit of fiddling to get the hang of it, but so do most puzzles worth doing. The instructions are clear, the presentation is great and I like the decision to prioritise a fun game over representing real Gerrymandering accurately. It looks like a lot of thought has gone into this.
I do believe the solution to gerrymandering in general is to move towards proportional representation so that the individual boundaries of a distinct are not as influential.
Maybe add that as an option to the game?
I sort of think that the increasing drive to gerrymander everything to the extreme may eventually show that First Past the Post voting is fundamentally broken and we have to replace it with proportional representation - or at least that is my hope.
The number of voting members has been strictly capped at 435 since the passage of the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929.
In 1930, there was an average of 294k citizens per Rep. In 2020, there was an average of 761k citizens per Rep. At some points in U.S. history, the ratio was 30k:1.
I am not sure whether having very small districts would help or hurt gerrymandering, because it all depends on spatial constraints and spatial/density autocorrelation. I do think it would be good for the Republic if our representatives cam from a local community where you reasonably expect that might have gone to school with them, or have met them at the coffee shop before, and where they can run a campaign by personally knocking on doors, which can be done if the ratio was like 80k:1.
I love the idea .. how you changed an important issue into a game and probably that would bring awareness. I am not an expert but such decisions probably affect a lot of people and no one spend time and learn about it. This is a fun way to learn. Thank you !!
Tesselation Games’ ‘Berrymandering’ tabletop game is also a fun way to depress yourself - and a fun way to introduce the idea of gerrymandering to friends and family who don’t ‘get’ it - and depress them too!
I think I did not understand this game well. May I suggest adding a few introductory levels of increasing difficulty for beginners.
It's interesting to think about how difficult it is to define "fair" with the current system. If a state's population is 60/40 and there are ten districts, do you want them each to be representative at 60/40, and thus 10-0? Or do you want six districts one way and four the other way? In other words, there's a real tension between "competitive districts" and "representative outcomes".
I got a flawless victory in a landslide with 0 hints but the result screen is a bit confusing. There are players that used hints that are to the "right" of where it shows me. Makes me feel like those people did better than me... But actually they did worse since they needed a hint or 4. Fun little game.
How do you curate the puzzle each day? Can you easily automate a bunch of puzzles then hand select them so back to back days aren't too similar? Or is it manual?
I love the idea! Took a while for my gf and I to get used to it, but it's so much fun now!
This felt very satisfying to win! (Day 39) I'll try to remember to keep coming back.
I think what made me quite confused at the start is mis-reading the instructions that every district could have no more than four houses; I thought I had to split the land into equal areas. Once I understood that, the solution felt much easier.
Interesting to see "neighbourhood" and "centre" in a game about gerrymandering, focused on the US. Anyone know where the creator is from? Is he/she a transplant to the US, or someone from another country who has taken an interest in the subject (perhaps realizing there might be market interest in such a big country)?
From a didactic perspective, it would cool if the result-screen illustrated how some voting-reform would have solved the sneaky win... but I guess that's not practical, since it'd rely on additional data which would detract from the ludic experience.
For example, one can't show how ranked-choice voting would reduce the dodgy win of X without also knowing how the Y/Z populace breaks down in terms of voting for the other side over X.
I LOVE that people are creating things like this. The best way to complain is to make things. More power to you!
I won't let me complete the final district (YRBY+" "s) in today's puzzle. (firefox/linux) If I try to do it earlier it auto includes unwanted cells.
The controls are really frustrating on mobile. Clicking a new tile sometimes adds it to my district. Other times it makes a new district?
Love this! It would be amazing to see daily puzzles built from actual historical maps. Letting people redraw a real gerrymandered district.
This reminds me of the plot some Libertarians had back in 2020 to win the U.S. presidential election by taking New Mexico or some other state. I can't remember how it was supposed to work mathematically, because NM doesn't have enough votes by itself to prevent either other candidate from getting a majority, but I remember having seen articles about it. (I tried searching to provide a link and can only find references to Texas, and I'm absolutely certain the articles I read were not about Texas.)
> Error Code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
Can't view it at all.
Politics aside, this is a fun type of puzzle!
Can I redraw the districts to look like a Gerrymandlebrot set?
great idea to make Gerrymandle! congrats on the alpha
US/California etc gerrymandering is dramatically illegal IMHO. I see the recent gerrymandering in the USA as a kind of political cancer actually....
very basic issue, its not clear to me how to start a new district, it just extends the old one. I managed to do it accidentally a couple times, but I don't know how
The entire concept of democracy is flawed. There should be proportional representation based on IQ and paid taxes.
And that’s why we can’t have nice things
I could see this being a great activity in a high school civics class. Very creative. One rule that tripped me up is:
> If two parties tie in a district, nobody wins it.
This isn't realistic as ties don't happen in practice in elections, and some party will end up representing it. But the spirit of the gerrymandering concept is conveyed well enough.