Gauge
One of the main methods for studying the activity of the network component in Simbrain is by using the gauge component. Each gauge is an instance of a program called HiSee. HiSee is a high dimensional visualizer that can take a collection of states that are visited by a neural network and project them down into two dimensions so that many of their geometric and topological properties can be observed.
What the Dots Represent
Each "dot" in the gauge represents a state of the network. When a gauge is first opened, there are no dots, since no state information has been sent to the gauge yet. With each update of the network, state information is sent to the gauge which is then displayed as a red dot. The set of dots that appear in the gauge window represent the states that have been visited by the associated network since the gauge was added. This representation of the history of a network's activity allows for the user to understand and analyze the network's behavior. As the network is updated the user can watch new dots appear as new states arise.
The gauge below represents the states that have occurred in a network with 20 neurons. Each dot corresponds to one of those states, where the red dot is current state, and the blue dots are all previous states (colors can be changed in the Preferences Dialog). Points that are close to each other in the gauge correspond to patterns of activity that are similar. One can linger over a data point to reveal a tooltip that displays which high-dimensional position they correspond to.
When a gauge is created by pressing a network's Gauge button, they, by default, represent the activity of all the neurons across the network, though they can be set to represent any subset of the neurons of a neural network. Gauges can also be used to represent weight strengths.
Pan and Zoom
The gauge display is currently 2-dimensional. It is based on the Piccolo zoomable user interface (ZUI), which allows users to pan and zoom and graphical data. When autoscale in the preference menu is turned off, you can pan the visible data by left-dragging (dragging the mouse while holding the left-mouse button down), and you can zoom in or out on data by right-dragging (dragging the mouse while holding the right button down).