Trees

Definition of a tree
 A tree is like a binary tree, except that a node may have any
number of children
Depending on the needs of the program, the children may or may not be
ordered
 Like a binary tree, a tree has a
root, internal nodes, and leaves
A  Each node contains an element
and has branches leading to other
B C D E nodes (its children)
 Each node (other than the root)
F G H I J K has a parent
 Each node has a depth (distance
L M N from the root)

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 More definitions
 An empty tree has no nodes
 The descendents of a node are its children and the descendents
of its children
 The ancestors of a node are its parent (if any) and the
ancestors of its parent
 The subtree rooted at a node consists of the given node and all
its descendents
 An ordered tree is one in which the order of the children is
important; an unordered tree is one in which the children of a
node can be thought of as a set
 The branching factor of a node is the number of children it has
 The branching factor of a tree is the average branching factor
of its nodes

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 Data structure for a tree
 A node in a binary tree can be represented as follows:
class BinaryTreeNode {
Object value;
BinaryTreeNode leftChild, rightChild;
}

 However, each node in a tree has an arbitrary number of children,

so we need something that will hold an arbitrary number of
nodes, such as an ArrayList
class TreeNode {
Object value;
ArrayList children;
}

 If we don’t care about the order of children, we might use a Set

instead of a ArrayList

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 ADT for a tree
 It must be possible to:
 Construct a new tree
 If a tree can be empty, this may require a header node
 Add a child to a node
 Get (iterate through) the children of a node
 Access (get and set) the value in a node
 It should probably be possible to:
 Remove a child (and the subtree rooted at that child)
 Get the parent of a node

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 Traversing a tree
 You can traverse a tree in preorder:
void preorderPrint(node) {
System.out.println(node);
Iterator iter = node.children.iterator();
while (iter.hasNext()) {
preorderPrint(iter.next());
}
}
 You can traverse a tree in postorder:
void postorderPrint(node) {
Iterator iter = node.children.iterator();
while (iter.hasNext()) {
postorderPrint(iter.next());
}
System.out.println(node);
}
 You can’t usually traverse a tree in inorder
 Why not?
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 Other tree manipulations
 There’s really nothing new to talk about; you’ve
seen it all with binary trees

 A tree consists of nodes, each node has references

to some other nodes—you know how to do all this
stuff

 There are some useful algorithms for searching

trees, and with some modifications they also apply
to searching graphs

 Let’s move on to some applications of trees

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 File systems
 File systems are almost always implemented as a tree
structure
 The nodes in the tree are of (at least) two types: folders (or
directories), and plain files
 A folder typically has children—subfolders and plain files
 A folder also contains a link to its parent—in both Windows and
UNIX, this link is denoted by ..
 In UNIX, the root of the tree is denoted by /
 A plain file is typically a leaf

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 Family trees
 It turns out that a tree is not a good way to
represent a family tree
 Every child has two parents, a mother and a father
 Parents frequently remarry
 An “upside down” binary tree almost works
 Since it is a biological fact (so far) that every child has
exactly two parents, we can use left child = father and
right child = mother
 The terminology gets a bit confusing
 If you could go back far enough, it becomes a
mathematical certainty that the mother and father have
some ancestors in common

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 Part of a genealogy

Isaac

Steven Danielle

Paul
David Winfred Carol
a

Chester Elaine Eugene Pauline

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 Game trees
 Trees are used heavily in implementing games, particularly
board games
 A node represents a position on the board
 The children of a node represent all the possible moves from
that position
 More precisely, the branches from a node represent the possible moves;
the children represent the new positions
 Planning ahead (in a game) means choosing a path through the
tree
 However—
 You can’t have a cycle in a tree
 If you can return to a previous position in a game, you have a cycle
 Graphs can have cycles

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 Binary trees for expressions
 Ordered trees can be used to represent arithmetic expressions
+ + *
2 2 2 * + 4
The expression 2+2
3 4 2 3
The expression 2+3*4 The expression (2+3)*4

 To evaluate an expression (given as a node):

 If it is a leaf, the element in it specifies the value
 If the element is a number, that number is the value
 If the element is a variable, look up its value in a table
 If it is not a leaf, the element in it specifies an operation
 Evaluate the children and combine them according to the operation

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 (General) trees for expressions
 You can use binary trees for expressions if you have only unary
and binary operators
 Java has a ternary operator
?: if

> x y > = =

x y x y max x max y
The expression x > y ? x : y The statement if (x > y) max = x;
else max = y;

 Trees can be used to represent statements as well as

expressions
 Statements can be evaluated as easily as expressions

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 More trees for statements
while (n >= 1) { for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
exp = x * exp; a[i] = 0;
n--;
}
for
while
= < ++ =
>= ;

n 1 = -- int 0 i n i [] 0

exp * n i a i

x exp

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 Writing compilers and interpreters
 A compiler does three things:
 Parses the input program (converts it into an abstract syntax tree)
 (Optionally) optimizes the abstract syntax tree
 Traverses the tree and outputs assembly language or machine code
to do the same operations
 An interpreter does three things:
 Parses the input program (converts it into an abstract syntax tree)
 (Optionally) optimizes the abstract syntax tree
 Traverses the tree in an order controlled by the node contents, and
performs the operations as it goes
 Parsing is usually the hard part, but there is a very simple
technique (called recursive descent parsing) that can be
used if the language is carefully designed and you don’t
care too much about efficiency or good error messages

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 I’ll never need to write a compiler...
 Are you sure?
 If you can’t parse text inputs, you are limited to reading simple
things like numbers and Strings
 If you can parse text input, you can make sense of:
 tell Mary "Meet me at noon"
 fire phasers at 3, 7
 17.25, 0.203 + 8.97i, 0.95i
 28°12"48'
 3:30pm-5pm
 Parsing is less important in these days of GUIs, but it’s still pretty
important
 Java provides basic support for parsing with its StringTokenizer and
StreamTokenizer classes

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The End

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