[{"id":388,"title":"An algorithm to end gerrymandering","sha":"1bd10c15e9151e2551f8a1e3817af0f5","user_id":null,"state":"published","body":"U.S. House of Representative districts are bounded by centuries-old state borders, and redrawn by state legislatures. This has led to constitutional problems, and overcoming the problem of gerrymandering has not gone away. I propose a distance-weighted voting algorithm where any citizen can vote for any candidate in the country, and the 435 candidates with the highest weighted aggregate votes will become congresspeople. A Voronoi diagram will be used to partition the country into districts. The weighting scheme will encourage people to vote for candidates who are geographically close to them, but gives the option of voting for someone far away, with a distance penalty of, say, 1/d. For example, if someone votes for a person who is 1 mile away, they contribute is 1/1 = 1 vote. If someone votes for a person who is 100 miles away, that is 1/100 = 0.01 votes. At the end, all votes are summed, and the top 435 candidates win. \r\nThis algorithm will reduce gerrymandering, weaken tribalism, and continuously update borders in a data-driven way. \r\nFuture work will involve methods to outright dissolve the Senate, as it is based on an irrelevant 226-year-old compromise based on lines drawn by European aristocrats. ","created_at":"2017-05-26T23:27:35.077Z","updated_at":"2019-04-29T10:01:16.584Z","zenodo_id":800515,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.800515","subject":null,"tags":["algorithms","voting","government"],"vote_count":3,"view_count":1,"score":3.1,"deleted":false,"muted":false,"tweeted":true,"attachment_file_name":null,"attachment_content_type":null,"attachment_file_size":null,"attachment_updated_at":null},{"id":1029,"title":"Application of the Central Limit Theorem to dice notation parsing","sha":"fc25de499b44d47685188df4d09e144f","user_id":null,"state":"published","body":"The Central Limit Theorem ([Moivre, 1738](https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139833783)) describes how a normal distribution can be used to approximate the sum of identical distributions. \r\n\r\nThis approximation can be used in optimizations for dice notation parsers to calculate the result of rolling a large number of dice.\r\n\r\nA parser given a dice notation \"1000000d6\" will roll a six-sided dice 1000000 times. Instead a calculation can be done to select a value with a constant time independent of the number of dice.\r\n\r\n- calculate a random value in a normal distribution with mean 0 and std 1 (This can be done via an algorithm such as the Box-Muller Transform ([Box, Muller, 1958](https://doi.org/10.1214%2Faoms%2F1177706645))\r\n- scale the value by the size of the approximated range\r\n- increment the value by the minimum dice roll value (1 * 1000000)\r\n\r\nThis optimization was implemented on the GNOLL dice notation parser ([Hunter, 2022](https://joss.theoj.org/papers/c704c5148e622d32403948320c5e96a1)) and eliminated the adverse scaling of the parser when using large values in dice notation statements. \r\n\r\nA performance graph is attached.","created_at":"2022-11-29T10:00:25.273Z","updated_at":"2023-02-07T09:25:25.325Z","zenodo_id":7539332,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7539332","subject":null,"tags":["dice notation","dice","algorithms","games"],"vote_count":1,"view_count":1,"score":1.1,"deleted":false,"muted":false,"tweeted":true,"attachment_file_name":"Performance_Delta.png","attachment_content_type":"image/png","attachment_file_size":29229,"attachment_updated_at":"2022-11-29T10:01:36.988Z"},{"id":488,"title":"Social Jailbreak: a social media aggregator designed to circumvent social media monopolies","sha":"8e322a486ac6a4c98fd742580169e2d1","user_id":null,"state":"published","body":"**Social Jailbreak** (SJB) describes a proposed viral application that would allow social media users to communicate beyond the limits imposed by social media monopolies. Several platforms (e.g. Hootsuite) and some social networks (mainly Friendica) merge their users' different newsfeeds that they have on other networks, to put them back in control and at the center of their entire online presence. Unfortunately, [the most popular social network](https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/) has [disallowed the importation](https://hyp.is/_uNnqLvVEeiorDdKMLuEfQ/www.makeuseof.com/tag/manage-social-feeds-hootsuite/) of personal newsfeeds. \r\n\r\nOne way to durably escape such social jails is to provide users a technical method to seamlessly share their soon-to-be jailed publications with others. While it is against the terms of social jails to export personal newsfeeds, personal contents can be published outside of the social jail *before* being fed to the social jail, and exchanged through the SJB parallel network, and if all the users appearing in each other's personal newsfeed have installed SJB (in a single click), they will all be able to consult and rearrange their newsfeed from outside any social jail. It will then be possible to merge all social contents (including forum messages, comments left anywhere, etc.).\r\n\r\nSocial Jailbreak would allow users to train their own algorithms, that would sort contents from those different sources in creative, emancipatory and non-mercantile ways (see MIT's [Gobo](https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/gobo/overview/)), thus breaking the spell of social jails.\r\n\r\n\r\n","created_at":"2018-09-19T06:52:52.478Z","updated_at":"2018-09-20T06:01:04.992Z","zenodo_id":1421986,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1421986","subject":null,"tags":["social media","algorithms","monopolies","freedom of association"],"vote_count":0,"view_count":1,"score":0.1,"deleted":false,"muted":false,"tweeted":true,"attachment_file_name":null,"attachment_content_type":null,"attachment_file_size":null,"attachment_updated_at":null},{"id":783,"title":"The Journal of Competitive Programming","sha":"22d162eea10da254172a9d3bd3559749","user_id":null,"state":"published","body":"Competitive Programming (CP) or Sports Programming is solving well-defined problem statements abiding by time and memory constraints with the help of [sandboxed environments](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2126174/what-is-sandboxing) on computing machines, appropriate data structures, and algorithms. Many journals are related to algorithms and respective real-life uses, but not specific for CP. Currently, 19+ online coding platforms support 30+ programming languages. The top MNCs like [FAANG](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/faang-stocks.asp) also support CP and hire thousands of engineers proficient in CP. CP's scope is to test and improve analytical, mathematical, and problem-solving abilities and not necessarily the real-life problems. Much of the content related to CP present on the internet is redundant and scattered because of many websites, repositories, videos, and blogs managed by public and private communities, clubs, and organizations. All platforms are open for general discussions but lag an accepted peer-review process due to which a lot of content is either incomplete or incorrect. These scenarios make it difficult for someone who has developed a new algorithm and aims to publish it in a centralized peer-reviewed journal used and contributed to by everyone with open access. The author's rights and the credits for inventing new algorithms or new computing methods should be protected using a recognized journal whose scope is CP.","created_at":"2020-09-22T17:55:18.277Z","updated_at":"2021-02-24T18:29:34.365Z","zenodo_id":4047634,"doi":"https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4047634","subject":null,"tags":["competitive-programming","sports-programming","algorithms","problem-solving","data-structures","faang","peer-review"],"vote_count":2,"view_count":1,"score":2.1,"deleted":false,"muted":false,"tweeted":true,"attachment_file_name":null,"attachment_content_type":null,"attachment_file_size":null,"attachment_updated_at":null}]