Cartogram studio

The same cartogram, solved in your browser instead of in R. Change a parameter and it re-solves: states are rescaled to their seat count, dropped into their slots, pushed apart until nothing overlaps, carved into equal-area cells, and the cells matched back to districts. How each step works →

Seats per state

Drives everything downstream — each state's size and its number of cells.

State size 2.90

The area divisor. Lower makes every state bigger, so the map fills more of the frame — and collides sooner.

Padding 2.0 px

The gap the relaxation enforces between any two states. Zero skips relaxation and leaves them in their slots.

Placement Hand nudges (New England, WV, LA) New England moves as one body Ghost the R build's layout

Cells Colour by 2022 winner

Sample points per seat 200

More points means a better area estimate and a slower solve. The R build uses 600.

Seed

The sampling is the only randomness. Same seed, same cells.

Solve as I change things

placement: —
carving: —
matching: —
vs. the R build: —

What is actually running here

Projection, simplification and dissolve are mapshaper's, done once — those are the topological operations, and they are baked into the state outlines this page loads. Everything numerical is redone live by web/solver.js: the seat-proportional rescaling, the boundary-disc relaxation, uniform sampling, k-means, the capacity-balanced power diagram, and the Hungarian assignment. It is a port of the R code, and it is checked against it — sh/12_test_solver.js confirms the assignment finds the same optimum R does and that the relaxation leaves no two states closer than the padding.

Two honest caveats. First, cells here are the raw convex polygons; the browser clips them to the state outline at paint time with an SVG clipPath rather than intersecting the geometry as mapshaper does. Identical on screen, but not true clipped geometry — exact areas and exported files come from the R build. Second, this will not land on pixel-identical positions to that build. The relaxation is a Gauss–Seidel iteration, which is chaotic: a difference of 10⁻¹³ in the first pass grows by roughly a factor of ten per iteration. Every run is a valid re-solve, not a reproduction. What holds either way is the invariant — no two states closer than the padding you asked for.