About AAW

Motivation

The main motivation behind this site is as a learning and teaching aid in the field of algorithms and data-structures. A series of visualizations, including algorithm pseudocode, are provided to illustrate the workings of important algorithms in Computer Science.

History

AAW is an ongoing project of Professor Andranik Mirzaian. The original incarnation was developed during the winter of 2001 by Sotirios Stergiopoulos and Hang Thi Anh Pham as part of a project course for the Department of Computer Science at York University. A number of other students continued to develop it over the years. Originally, the animations were implemented using Java Applets. In recent years, browsers have been offering less and less support for applets.

In Winter 2019, Jay Karon and Nadav Hames redeveloped the site using JavaScript in order to make it more easily viewable in modern browsers. They also redesigned it with usability and extensibility in mind, in an effort to make it more appealing for students to contribute.

The new site is just in its infancy and work still needs to be done to port many of the visualizations that were available to the new system. The Java versions can still be viewed in the Legacy section of the site. If you are interested in contributing, by porting old visualizations or adding new ones, look here!

Usage

To get started click on the Detailed Menu link on the top right. You can browse all the algorithms there. On every page there is a description of the algorithm and general help on how to use the visualizations. You can also access the original Java visualizations by clicking Legacy.