Graphs, Connectivity, and Traversals
Graphs, Connectivity, and Traversals Definitions Like trees, graphs represent a fundamental data structure used in computer science. We often hear about cyber space as being a new frontier for mankind, and if we look at the structure of cyberspace, we see that it is structured as a graph; in other words, it consists of places (nodes), and connections between those places. Some applications of graphs include • representing electronic circuits • modeling object interactions (e.g. used in the Unified Modeling Language) • showing ordering relationships between computer programs • modeling networks and network traffic • the fact that trees are a special case of graphs, in that they are acyclic and connected graphs, and that trees are used in many fundamental data structures 1 An undirected graph G = (V; E) is a pair of sets V , E, where • V is a set of vertices, also called nodes. • E is a set of unordered pairs of vertices called edges, and are of the form (u; v), such that u; v 2 V . • if e = (u; v) is an edge, then we say that u is adjacent to v, and that e is incident with u and v. • We assume jV j = n is finite, where n is called the order of G. •j Ej = m is called the size of G. • A path P of length k in a graph is a sequence of vertices v0; v1; : : : ; vk, such that (vi; vi+1) 2 E for every 0 ≤ i ≤ k − 1. { a path is called simple iff the vertices v0; v1; : : : ; vk are all distinct.
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