Animations for STV Elections

[prismika]

Pursuant to issue #222. This PR adds support for animating STV elections using Manim. Given a votekit STV election called election, the user can render an animation using, for example,

animation = STVAnimation(election, title=f"Animation of STV Election")
animation.render(preview=True)

Here is an example of a rendered scene.

ElectionScene2.mp4

This PR is a draft. I have yet to write robust testing for the animation pipeline (such as snapshot testing). I also have yet to implement a few requested features:

• Letting users specify which candidates are on screen, batching offscreen eliminations into a single animation event.
• Letting users specify nicknames for candidates to appear onscreen.
• "Light mode"

Before implementing these I wanted some feedback on my code so far.

Thanks!

[cdonnay]

Hi @prismika. Switching computers here so just submitting a partial review for now, will pick it back up in an hour or so.

[cdonnay]

Alright review complete!

1. This looks great already! I think you should feel confident moving onto your other todos.
2. I'd encourage a little more modularization. You can see the code for PreferenceProfile as an example of super tiny private methods that build into the bigger methods. Peter is a big fan of keeping functions short.

[cdonnay]

Since I am not a manim guy, I'm going to skip looking at that code for now since the animation clearly works. But the same overall review comments would apply; aim for super tiny private methods that build into bigger ones (up to reason). @peterrrock2 will check out your manim code when he gets a chance.

[peterrrock2]

This is looking great!

Small nit: I am trying to unify the doc string style across the repository. Can you modify the doc strings to look more like:

def  foo( arg1: str | None, arg2: int = 3) -> str:
    """
    Brief description (max 100 chars including indents)

    More details (max 100 chars per line, but as many lines as you would like)

    Example: 
        <Stuff goes here. This section is optional>

    Args:
        arg1 (str | None): description
        arg2 (int, optional): description. Defaults to 3.

    Returns:
        str: The string "baz"
    """
   ...

This is a mild modification of the Google-style doc string and adheres to the PEP 257 recommendation but with the line width modified to 100 chars rather than 80 (better for 16:9 screens IMO)