Re: [eclipse-users] node(daVinci) and uDraw(Graph)

Hi,

Tias Guns wrote:
>
>
> This is a really powerfull visualisation tool, I like it a lot.
> I'm not sure what the double borders and cursive values try to tell, 
> they don't seem to add information ?
> What would be really cool is if the graph would be updated 
> incrementally (flush a new node and its edges immediately to uDraw 
> when it is created). That way, it could be used together with the 
> 'Visualisation Client'. You could watch the variables get assigned and 
> propagated in the Visualisation Client, and at the same time you could 
> see the search tree being traversed in uDraw !
>
Thanks for your modifications!

What do you use the search-tree visualisation for? For example, do you 
use it for debugging, and/or are you using it to better understand the 
execution of your program?

We have been interested in visualising the search process, and I would 
like to know how people want to use it Currently we don't have 
sufficient resource to develop this, but one reason for open sourcing 
ECLiPSe is to allow the user community to contribute, and we would 
certainy welcome any contribution in this area!

While at IC-Parc, a visiting student developed a 3-D visualisation of 
the search-tree, which was able to display the search-tree 
incrementally. I am not sure if this code was ever distributed, and we 
took it out from the source when ECLiPSe was open-sourced, because we 
were not sure of the licensing and porting issues (for example the code 
uses OpenGL). I took a quick look at the code again today, and it seems 
that we should be able to open source the source code itself.

I think one important issue with visualisation of the search process is 
how this will work with large programs, which will have very large 
search space that will be impossible to display all at once. I was not 
directly involved with the 3-D search-tree visualisation, but I think 
one reason that 3-D was used is that it allowed more flexibility for the 
display (e.g. you need to worry less about overlapping nodes when you 
display them), and it allowed zooming in and out from parts of the 
search-tree.

For incremental display of the search-tree with lib(daVinci) and 
search/6, you can always modify the search/6 predicate to do this -- the 
code for this is in <ECLiPSe>/icparc_solvers/generic_search.ecl.

Cheers,

Kish