Programs for Playing with the Politics of Redistricting
Anyone interested in taking a closer look at the algorithms discussed here is invited to read the program source code. The programs are written in the programming language called Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. (For more information on the language, see the Internet Scheme Repository). There are two files:
- Program source code (60 kilobytes). Includes implementations of the four algorithms discussed in the text.
- A database of North Carolina counties (32 kilobytes). Includes basic demographic data and polygonal outlines of the 100 counties, in a format directly readable by the redistricting programs. The low-level procedures for accessing the database records are also included in this file.
If you experiment with the programs, I would be pleased to hear about it, but I can offer only limited help in getting them running. Please send comments to bhayes@amsci.org.