You sound a little demanding when you capitalize "NOT" like that.
I didn't make the visualization but I find the circles to be a good choice. Not only is it pretty, it makes use of two-dimensional space in a consistent way. A factor of 5 has the same shape whenever it appears.
If you factorized things into a straight line, do you just line everything up horizontally, in which case you just see hundreds of dots with gaps in them and there would be nothing interesting about the visualization? Or do you make rectangles, with some of the factors going vertically? In that case, sometimes your 5s will go horizontally and sometimes they'll go vertically, making a distinction out of nothing.
I think this actually wasn't an arbitrary choice, but a result of the algorithm.. e.g. factors are displayed as clusters ordered in a circle (factors of 2 is a circle with groups of 2, factors of 3 is a circle of groups of 3).
I didn't make the visualization but I find the circles to be a good choice. Not only is it pretty, it makes use of two-dimensional space in a consistent way. A factor of 5 has the same shape whenever it appears.
If you factorized things into a straight line, do you just line everything up horizontally, in which case you just see hundreds of dots with gaps in them and there would be nothing interesting about the visualization? Or do you make rectangles, with some of the factors going vertically? In that case, sometimes your 5s will go horizontally and sometimes they'll go vertically, making a distinction out of nothing.