Over the entire run, the GA would go through 1,000,000 individuals and 500,000 reproduction events. For each individual, we may be interested in its parents, the number of times it reproduced, and the number of offspring it had. Keeping track of the building blocks or partial solutions on each individual and how they are created, propagated, and destroyed further increases the amount of data to be analyzed. While all of this data can easily be saved into files, organizing and making sense of such a large amount of data is no trivial task. Graphical visualization techniques are some of the simplest and at the same time most powerful methods for analyzing and communicating information.
Patterns are often much easier to detect in graphical representations rather than textual data.
The VIS program is a tool which allows you to do offline visualization and analysis of the events and details of a GA run. Display of data at varying levels of resolution. The ability to more freely forwards and backwards in evolutionary time. Display details of reproduction events. Trace family trees.