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Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Stanford Predicts: Presidential Elections Tracked at Stanford

I am in the Stanford Predicts team led by Prof. Sam Chiu, and was able to use the work on floodfill to create a map showing the distribution of Bush and Kerry's winning chances. Check out the site for the latest on the Presidential Elections.

You can also try the interactive map.

To all the hackers out there - here's a little challenge. When you move the mouse over the states, you will see the display change instantly. Detecting which state (polygon) you're in is a non-trivial problem for java applets. How do you think the detection is being done to give a real-time response?

HINT: Look at the states really hard. The proof is in the picture (or the pudding).