Animated graphs in ipython notebook

Question

Is there a way of creating animated graphs. For example showing the same graph, with different parameters.

For example is SAGE notebook, one can write:

a = animate([circle((i,i), 1-1/(i+1), hue=i/10) for i in srange(0,2,0.2)], 
            xmin=0,ymin=0,xmax=2,ymax=2,figsize=[2,2])
a.show()

Answer 1

This has horrible flickering, but at least this creates a plot that animates for me. It is based on Aron's, but Aron's does not work as-is.

import time, sys
from IPython.core.display import clear_output
f, ax = plt.subplots()

n = 30
x = array([i/10.0 for i in range(n)])
y = array([sin(i) for i in x])
for i in range(5,n):
  ax.plot(x[:i],y[:i])
  time.sleep(0.1)
  clear_output()
  display(f)
  ax.cla() # turn this off if you'd like to "build up" plots
plt.close()

Answer 2

Update: January 2014

Jake Vanderplas has created a Javascript-based package for matplotlib animations available here. Using it is as simple as:

 # https://github.com/jakevdp/JSAnimation
 from JSAnimation import examples
 examples.basic_animation()

See his blog post for a more complete description and examples. Historical answer (see goger for a correction)

Yes, the Javascript update does not correctly hold the image frame yet, so there is flicker, but you can do something quite simple using this technique:

import time, sys
from IPython.display import clear_output
f, ax = plt.subplots()

for i in range(10):
  y = i/10*sin(x) 
  ax.plot(x,y)
  time.sleep(0.5)
  clear_output()
  display(f)
  ax.cla() # turn this off if you'd like to "build up" plots
plt.close()