Gato 1.2.7

Graph Animation Toolbox: animating algorithms on graphs

Gato, the Graph Animation Toolbox (see 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, 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 https://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. Animations can be viewed in the desktop app or saved as HTML files with a JavaScript and SVG-based player for online viewing. See https://schliep.org/CATBox/WebGato/index.html for examples.

Gato and CATBox have 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 at Gothenburg University, Sweden.

Gato is Copyright (C) 2016-2020 Alexander Schliep, Copyright 1998-2015, Alexander Schliep and Winfried Hochstaettler, and Copyright 1998-2001 ZAIK/ZPR, Universitaet zu Koeln, Germany.

WebGato, the included standards-compliant JavaScript-player which allows to play animation created with Gato on the web, is licensed under the GPL version 3 or later. It has been developed by Scott Merkling and Alexander Schliep and is copyright (C) 2014-20 AlexanderSchliep, and copyright (C) 2014-16 Scott Merkling.

Versions 1.2.x run with Python 2.7. There is a 2.x release upcoming with Python 3 support.