BlockTree - Pedagogical Information Visualization for Heuristic Search
David Furcy, Andrew Jungwirth, Thomas L. Naps · 2007
BlockTree is an information visualization tool that helps students explore nuances of heuristic search algorithms, such as A * and WA*. The goal of such exploration is to achieve a level of understanding that is deeper than merely being able to trace the algorithm on an artificially small domain. Instead, BlockTree presents a single execution snapshot of a heuristic search tree encompassing up to hundreds of thousands of nodes and offers a robust GUI that encourages viewing such a tree from a variety of perspectives. By experimenting with the visualizations generated by the problem domains already incorporated into BlockTree, students are exposed to the same large-scale issues that AI practitioners face on a regular basis. Beyond these built-in problem domains, BlockTree offers an extensible object-oriented framework that can be used as the