Comic Strips for Algorithm Visualization
Henning Biermann, Richard Cole · 1999
This paper presents visualizations of binary search trees and splay trees. The visualizations comprise sequences of figures or frames, called comic strips. Consecutive frames are viewed two at a time to facilitate user (viewer) understanding of the algorithm steps. The visualizations are implemented in Java to facilitate their wide use. This paper explores several other considerations in the design of instructional visualizations. 1 Introduction The potential of dynamic visual presentations of combinatorial algorithms has been manifest for at least two decades. One early and impressive demonstration was the sorting movie of Backer and Sherman [BS82]. A subsequent landmark, which delineated the design of animation systems, was the Zeus system [Bro91] of Brown (also see his thesis [Bro83, Bro87]). Over the years, it has inspired a still growing number of animation systems (Tango [Sta90], XTango, Polka, Leonardo [CDF + 97]). The advent of Java and the World Wide Web has caused a f...