This is very close to a direct visualization of the Morse-Smale complex of the function. The Morse-Smale complex only shows the critical points of the function: the maxima, minima, and saddle points. Here we can identify these points. however there is no way to recover the input values corresponding to these points. While there are 2 x-axes (labelled x1 and x2), these are a non-linear warping of the input space into 2 dimensions for visualization purposes and have no correspondence to the original input dimensions. The curve shown between the critical points is an estimation of the curvature of the function in high dimensions but doesn’t represent its true behavior.