Explain BFS and DFS in terms of backtracking

Posted by HH on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by HH
Published on 2010-04-25T16:57:16Z Indexed on 2010/04/25 17:03 UTC
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Wikipedia about DFS

Depth-first search (DFS) is an algorithm for traversing or searching a tree, tree structure, or graph. One starts at the root (selecting some node as the root in the graph case) and explores as far as possible along each branch before backtracking.

So is BFS?

"an algorithm that choose a starting node, checks all nodes -- backtracks --, chooses the shortest path, chose neighbour nodes -- backtracks --, chose the shortest path -- finally finds the optimal path because of traversing each path due to continuos backtracking.

Regex, find's pruning -- backtracking?

The term backtracking confuseses due to its variety of use. UNIX find's pruning an SO-user explained with backtracking. Regex Buddy uses the term "catastrophic backtracking" if you do not limit the scope of your Regexes. It seems to be too wide umbrella-term. So:

  1. how do you define "Backtracking" GRAPH-theoretically?
  2. what is "backtracking" in BFS and DFS?

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