
Gato the Graph Animation Toolbox

Gato, the Graph Animation Toolbox http://gato.sf.net by Alexander
Schliep and Winfried Hochstaettler, is a LGPL-licensed Python
application which animates algorithms on graphs. It uses Tkinter and
runs on Unix, MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

It is primarily a teaching tool, but can also be useful in research on
algorithm design and engineering, for example by demonstrating effects of
heuristics.

It is used in CATBox (Springer 2010, see authors' website
http://schliep.org/CATBox) by Winfried Hochstaettler and Alexander
Schliep. CATBox is a textbook on combinatorial optimization on graphs
(traversals, minimal spanning trees, shortest paths, maximum flows,
min-cost flows, cardinality and weighted matching) which uses Gato to
provide interactive animations and exercises for all algorithms.  A
screencast is at:
http://biomaps.rutgers.edu/~schliep/CATBox/Dijkstra.swf

Gato and CATBox has been used in university classrooms for several
years by us and colleagues on several continents at the undergraduate
and graduate level.  Winfried Hochstaettler is a professor in
mathematics at the FernUniversitaet Hagen, Germany and Alexander
Schliep is an associate professor in computer science and quantitative
biology at Rutgers University.

