ELICIT: Evolutionary Computation Visualization

ELICIT is a generic tool that enables the visual exploration of evolutionary computation algorithms. It is characterized by the use of simple visual elements to represent information and by the adoption of interactive techniques which allow the navigation between different granularity levels, i.e., it allows the visualization of data from single runs as well as the display of aggregated data, resulting from multiple evolutionary runs. Visualization of lineages is supported, assisting the user in understanding how a given solution was reached. It also provides several visualization modes to inspect the genetic heritage and offspring of individuals and populations. The application was built with the purpose of being capable to deal with different types of representation, allowing the visualization of both genotypes and phenotypes. This paper describes the main visualization modes offered by the tool, presenting examples of its application to tree and graph-based representations.