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The Turing Test for Graph Drawing Algorithms

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Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12590))

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Abstract

Do algorithms for drawing graphs pass the Turing Test? That is, are their outputs indistinguishable from graphs drawn by humans? We address this question through a human-centred experiment, focusing on ‘small’ graphs, of a size for which it would be reasonable for someone to choose to draw the graph manually. Overall, we find that hand-drawn layouts can be distinguished from those generated by graph drawing algorithms, although this is not always the case for graphs drawn by force-directed or multi-dimensional scaling algorithms, making these good candidates for Turing Test success. We show that, in general, hand-drawn graphs are judged to be of higher quality than automatically generated ones, although this result varies with graph size and algorithm.

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Acknowledgement

We are grateful to all the experimental participants, to Drew Sheets who assisted with creating the graphs in yEd, and to John Hamer who implemented the online experimental system. Ethical approval was given by the University of Arizona Institutional Review Board (ref: 1712113015). This work is supported by NSF grants CCF-1740858, CCF-1712119, DMS-1839274, and FWF grant P 31119.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Helen C. Purchase

  2. Swansea University, Swansea, UK

    Daniel Archambault

  3. University of Arizona, Tucson, USA

    Stephen Kobourov

  4. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Martin Nöllenburg & Hsiang-Yun Wu

  5. Facebook, Menlo Park, USA

    Sergey Pupyrev

Authors
  1. Helen C. Purchase
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  2. Daniel Archambault
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  3. Stephen Kobourov
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  4. Martin Nöllenburg
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  5. Sergey Pupyrev
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  6. Hsiang-Yun Wu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daniel Archambault .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. LaBRI, University of Bordeaux, Talence, France

    David Auber

  2. Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Pavel Valtr

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Purchase, H.C., Archambault, D., Kobourov, S., Nöllenburg, M., Pupyrev, S., Wu, HY. (2020). The Turing Test for Graph Drawing Algorithms. In: Auber, D., Valtr, P. (eds) Graph Drawing and Network Visualization. GD 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12590. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68766-3_36

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68766-3_36

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-68766-3

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