Welcome to the CaGe

CaGe is an Open Source software package, implemented in C and Java. CaGe's task is to generate mathematical graphs of different types -- often types that relate to interesting chemical molecules -- and allow the user to view selected graphs in various ways or save them in several formats. If you have a normal, fairly modern UNIX system with Java, you can probably run CaGe.

How to cite CaGe

Please cite CaGe as follows

G. Brinkmann, O. Delgado Friedrichs, S. Lisken, A. Peeters, N. Van Cleemput, CaGe - a Virtual Environment for Studying Some Special Classes of Plane Graphs - an Update, MATCH Commun. Math. Comput. Chem., 63(3), pp. 533-552, 2010,

and include the URL of either one of the sites:

• http://www.math.uni-bielefeld.de/~CaGe
• http://caagt.ugent.be/CaGe.

Supported platforms

Linux has always been a supported platform, and is the platform on which CaGe development is done.

Since March 2007, Mac OS X is a supported platform thanks to changes made by Nicolas Van Cleemput of the Combinatorial algorithms and algorithmic graph theory research group at Ghent University, Belgium. (Our previous aim of providing a Windows version is currently not a priority.)

Overview

We hope that you will find CaGe intuitive to use. Working with the program follows a few simple steps:

• First you select a generator for a particular graph type.
• Then you set all generator-specific options.
• Finally, you choose output options -- what kind of results you want to generate (3D, 2D, "raw" adjacency info) and what you want to do with these results (write the full list into a file, or view selected graphs in several viewers).
• What happens next depends on what you chose to do with the results:
  • Writing full lists into a file creates a background task whose progress is shown in a separate window.
  • Interactive viewing is CaGe's main purpose. You can observe the "flow" of graphs produced by the generator, stop at a certain graph and do several things with that graph (view it, save it, export 2D views or "folding nets" in PostScript format).

Try it now

Interested? You don't have to read all the following pages before exploring CaGe. We recommend that you download and install the program straight away, and come back to the website if you need help about any particular window. Should you be unfamiliar with the mathematical concept of a graph and how that can be a model for a chemical molecule, you can read the next page before downloading.