I looked into this problem back in the 1970's, but I was never able to come up with a good intuition about how districting should work. I considered various "greedy" algorithms for growing regions starting from "seeds", but there didn't seem to be any good criteria for selecting the initial seeds. The other intuition is that of a gas under pressure living in the district where the State boundaries are rigid and the district boundaries are flexible, and the boundaries move until the pressure "equalizes". The boundary itself could have a bending energy (analogous to a physical "spline") which would tend to keep the boundaries fairly smooth. Unfortunately, this intuition/analogy only helps once the basic district is defined, and you want to allow the system to "relax" into its lowest energy state. It doesn't help choose the initial configuration. I suppose that one could come up with a "soap bubble" analogy, wherein each district started with 1/N amount of gas, where N is the number of Representatives for that State. The boundaries of these soap bubbles could move. However, I didn't see any way to guarantee that the solution would be unique and/or stable. The other problem with the "soap bubble" analogy is that the population density is extremely non-uniform, looking a lot more like fractal dust than uniform air pressure. Moving the boundary a tiny bit in a very dense region produces very large changes in the population of the district, while moving the boundary a tiny bit in a very sparse region has almost no change in the population of the district. This fractal density effect essentially _guarantees_ a fractal-like boundary, even with relatively stiff spline boundaries. Most of the suggestions I read about to make a district "compact" ignored the existing boundaries of the State in which the district would have to live. For example, if a State is long and thin, then a district in the middle will necessarily disconnect the State into districts on one side of the selected district from districts on the other side. If the State is thin enough, the problem is essentially one-dimensional, and then the boundaries can be adjusted by some sort of "pressure equalization" method. If a State has disconnected portions -- e.g., Michigan -- is a district allowed to cross the disconnect?