Breadth-first search


Breadth-first search is an algorithm for traversing or searching tree or graph data structures. It starts at the tree root, and explores all of the neighbor nodes at the present depth prior to moving on to the nodes at the next depth level.
It uses the opposite strategy as depth-first search, which instead explores the node branch as far as possible before being forced to backtrack and expand other nodes.
BFS and its application in finding connected components of graphs were invented in 1945 by Konrad Zuse, in his Ph.D. thesis on the Plankalkül programming language, but this was not published until 1972. It was reinvented in 1959 by Edward F. Moore, who used it to find the shortest path out of a maze, and later developed by C. Y. Lee into a wire routing algorithm.

Pseudocode

Input: A graph and a starting vertex of
Output: Goal state. The parent links trace the shortest path back to
1 procedure BFS is
2 let Q be a queue
3 label root as discovered
4 Q.enqueue
5 while Q is not empty do
6 v := Q.dequeue
7 if v is the goal then
8 return v
9 for all edges from v to w in G.adjacentEdges do
10 if w is not labeled as discovered then
11 label w as discovered
12 w.parent := v
13 Q.enqueue

More details

This non-recursive implementation is similar to the non-recursive implementation of depth-first search, but differs from it in two ways:
  1. it uses a queue instead of a stack and
  2. it checks whether a vertex has been discovered before enqueueing the vertex rather than delaying this check until the vertex is dequeued from the queue.
If is a tree, replacing the queue of this breadth-first search algorithm with a stack will yield a depth-first search algorithm. For general graphs, replacing the stack of the iterative depth-first search implementation with a queue would also produce a breadth-first search algorithm, although a somewhat nonstandard one.
The Q queue contains the frontier along which the algorithm is currently searching.
Nodes can be labelled as discovered by storing them in a set, or by an attribute on each node, depending on the implementation.
Note that the word node is usually interchangeable with the word vertex.
The parent attribute of each node is useful for accessing the nodes in a shortest path, for example by backtracking from the destination node up to the starting node, once the BFS has been run, and the predecessors nodes have been set.
Breadth-first search produces a so-called breadth first tree. You can see how a breadth first tree looks in the following example.

Example

The following is an example of the breadth-first tree obtained by running a BFS on German cities starting from Frankfurt:
with some connections between cities

Analysis

Time and space complexity

The time complexity can be expressed as, since every vertex and every edge will be explored in the worst case. is the number of vertices and is the number of edges in the graph.
Note that may vary between and, depending on how sparse the input graph is.
When the number of vertices in the graph is known ahead of time, and additional data structures are used to determine which vertices have already been added to the queue, the space complexity can be expressed as, where is the cardinality of the set of vertices. This is in addition to the space
required for the graph itself, which may vary depending on the graph representation used by an implementation of the algorithm.
When working with graphs that are too large to store explicitly, it is more practical to describe the complexity of breadth-first search in different terms: to find the nodes that are at distance from the start node, BFS takes time and memory, where is the "branching factor" of the graph.

Completeness

In the analysis of algorithms, the input to breadth-first search is assumed to be a finite graph, represented explicitly as an adjacency list, adjacency matrix, or similar representation. However, in the application of graph traversal methods in artificial intelligence the input may be an implicit representation of an infinite graph. In this context, a search method is described as being complete if it is guaranteed to find a goal state if one exists. Breadth-first search is complete, but depth-first search is not. When applied to infinite graphs represented implicitly, breadth-first search will eventually find the goal state, but depth-first search may get lost in parts of the graph that have no goal state and never return.

BFS ordering

An enumeration of the vertices of a graph is said to be a BFS ordering if it is the possible output of the application of BFS to this graph.
Let be a graph with vertices. Recall that is the set of neighbors of.
For be a list of distinct elements of, for, let be the least such that is a neighbor of, if such a exists, and be otherwise.
Let be an enumeration of the vertices of.
The enumeration is said to be a BFS ordering if, for all, is the vertex such that is minimal. Equivalently, is a BFS ordering if, for all with, there exists a neighbor of such that.

Applications

Breadth-first search can be used to solve many problems in graph theory, for example: