Re: New plot capability: "bee swarm" plots

[Tait <gnu...@t4...>]

> Here is a direct comparison of the output using the swarm jitter
> and a random (normal distribution) displacement about x.
> 
>   http://skuld.bmsc.washington.edu/~merritt/gnuplot/violin.html

At that zoom, the swarm jitter looks reasonable. There are two kinds
of "random" jitter, and I was not clear even with myself about which
one I meant where. A random offset indiscriminately applied to every
point, as you've shown in your example above, is still useful, but I
agree not as helpful as the swarm plot.

But going back to the zoom levels in
http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/~eklund/beeswarm/, what I'd want from a jitter
algorithm is that each point's offset from its original coordinate
is strictly the minimum offset necessary for that point to not
overlap its neighbors. That would eliminate the strings of points
getting increasingly large offsets just because the
immediately-preceeding point overlaps, when there's an open spot
closer to the central axis. I expect the outcome might look closer
to the "priority=random" plot near the bottom of the beeswarm page.