Gato - the Graph Animation Toolbox - is a software which visualizes algorithms on graphs. Graphs are mathematical objects consisting of vertices and edges connecting pairs of vertices: think of cities as vertices and interstates as edges connecting two cities. Algorithms might find a shortest path - the fastest route - or a minimal spanning tree or solve one of other interesting problems on graphs: maximal-flow, weighted and non-weighted matching and min-cost flow. Visualisation means linking cause - the statements of an algorithm - immediately to an effect - changes to the graph the algorithm has as its input - by terms of blinking, changing colors and other visual effects.

Gato is copyright © 2016-2020 AlexanderSchliep, copyright © 1998-2015 Alexander Schliep and Winfried Hochstättler, and copyright (c) 1998-2001 ZAIK/ZPR, an institute at the Unversität zu Köln. Gato is freely available under the LGPL version 2 or later and runs on all plattforms Python and Tcl/Tk run on, which includes at least Unix, Linux, MacOS X and Windows 98 onwards.

WebGato is a standards-compliant JavaScript-player which allows to play animation created with Gato on the web. Examples can be seen at https://schliep.org/CATBox/WebGato/ (Important: in the same directory containing an animation as HTML, there should be symbolic links to the directories Gato/svgs/js and Gato/svgs/css from the Gato distribution). WebGato is licensed under the GPL version 3 or later. It has been developed by Scott Merkling and Alexander Schliep and is copyright © 2014-20 AlexanderSchliep, and copyright © 2014-16 Scott Merkling.

Gato is used in CATBox (the Combinatorial Algorithm Toolbox - an interactive course on discrete mathematics) available from Springer Verlag and has been used for courses on algorithms both in the Computer Science and the Mathematics department taught at the University of Cologne, the Technical University Cottbus and Free University Berlin. You find binary releases at http://schliep.org/CATBox/


The development of Gato is hosted on Sourceforge. There is mirror GITHub repository at https://github.com/Schlieplab/Gato. Thanks for the support.