[eru]

Off-topic: I produced some similar-ish visualisations (also with Haskell).

http://paquari.com/qsort2000.png

Quicksort of 2000 random elements, (x,y) is black iff the algorithm compares x and y. You can clearly see how the pivots get compared to all the other elements.

http://paquari.com/msortOrig2000.png

A similar picture for merge-sort, but here (x,y) is black iff the algorithm compares the elements at original position x and y.

http://paquari.com/msort2000.png

Mergesort, but colouring like in the Quicksort case.