We saw in section III.2.3 that we wanted to avoid having the user rummaging in the mapfile for information about the possible destination addresses, especially so at runtime (if Tierra wants to access the file while the user is reading it, even in read only...).
Furthermore, there is no way for the user to really know what nodes Tierra is really talking to: the mapfile is accessible but never really up-to-date.
To solve both problems in one stroke, it should be a good idea to add the content of the IPMap to the data available though the frontend. Tierra currently displays the number of nodes in the IPMap. Along with the genome histograms, the users could have a menu option displaying the nodes in the IPMap, perhaps as addresses only, at first. Of course, there would be no names.
As a second option, Tierra could display the TPing data or part of it (Soup, Speed and NumCells), which would give a good idea of the state of the different nodes on the net.