I'm just a little bit curious...
Is there any "binary tree" in real-life other than a simple family structure?
... Food cooking? ... Or something else?
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I'm just a little bit curious...
Is there any "binary tree" in real-life other than a simple family structure?
... Food cooking? ... Or something else?
Actually, a family tree is not strictly a binary tree, as it's possible to have more than two siblings to a parent node.
Telephone exchanges used a tree hierarchy to find the actual target phone when dialing a phone number, for example. It is again not a binary tree, but a "decimal" tree with 10 nodes coming off each individual node. Of course, modern telephone exchanges are computerized, and the actual structure is not strictly a tree any longer.
And of course the structure of taxonomy (scientific names of species) is a tree - again not a binary tree.
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Mats
A family tree isn't even a tree, because branches can merge again.
Making it a "dag" (directed acyclic graph).Quote:
Originally Posted by CornedBee
In some places they allow cycles :eek:Quote:
Originally Posted by brewbuck
Wow, I'd like to see the time machine that makes this possible.
Enough inbreeding will make anything seem possible.Quote:
Originally Posted by CornedBee
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/54702/im_my_own_grandpa/
Note: This video or song contains nor condones any form of inbreeding. It's just cute.
Most decision-making processes can be represented as a binary tree. At each node of the tree a yes/no decision is made on some issue. Depending on which decision is made, another decision must be made, or some course of action is followed. So a path from root to leaf in this tree represents a chain of decisions which were made to arrive at that course of action.Quote:
Originally Posted by audinue
Decisions with more than two choices can still be represented as binary decisions. It just makes the tree deeper.
Nice explanation brewbuck... Thanks.Quote:
Originally Posted by brewbuck
Btw, any example of cases in real-life about binary tree anyone?
I thought brewbucks example IS that.Quote:
Originally Posted by audinue
Usually, at the back of your power-tools or such user's guide, there is a trouble-shooting guide:
Machine doesn't start:
Step 1.
Is the power-plugged in?
No - Plug it in,
Yes - Go to step 2.
2. Has the fuse blown?
Yes - replace fuse.
No - go to step 3.
... etc, etc.
That's exactly a binary tree.
Another form is "keys" for identifying species of animals, e.g. this one:
http://www.auburn.edu/academic/scien...h_key/key.html
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Mats
Another area where binary trees can be observed is in the language rules and are often used to build database dictionaries.
Which is quite a fascinating area, that of expressing hierarchies and trees in RDBMs. I wholeheartedly advise one of the most fascinating SQL books ever written: Morgan Kaufamann Publishers - Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties, by Joe Celko. I stumbled upon this book on a bookshop in Glenelg (Australia) while hunting for something completely unrelated. I ended up leaving the shop with it and not what I went there for.
Mario,
I think Audinue is asking for examples OUTSIDE of computers.
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Mats
The genetic material an offspring receives from its parents coudl be represented as a binar tree, since for each gene the child recieves either one copy or the other from a particular parent.Quote:
Originally Posted by audinue
Yeah! I found it!
http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpy...ml/chap20.html
Section 7 The animal tree
This is a simplest implementation of binary tree (which I can tell to my students *giggle*)...
It's often called "Animal Guess"
I hope there is another example that simple to understand for kids between 12 and 15 years old...
Cool... Thanks everyone for replying!
The animal tree is really just a different variant of the troubleshooting tree that I described earlier.
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Mats