李银杰小组第一次讨论论文.doc

Summary Gerrymandering, the practice of dividing political districts into winding and unfair geometries, has a deleterious effect on democratic accountability and participation. Incumbent politicians have an incentive to create districts to their advantage (California in 2000, Texas in 2003); so one proposed remedy for gerrymandering is to adopt an objective, possibly computerized, methodology for districting. We present two efficient algorithms for solving the districting problem by modeling it as a Markov decision process that rewards traditional measures of district “goodness”: eq