Software Developer Mock Interview

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Question 8 of 30

Can you walk me through the meaning behind a Depth First Search Algorithm for a binary tree?

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Tom Dushaj
Tom Dushaj

Tom Dushaj is a business and technology executive and the author of 'Resumes That Work.' Tom has vast experience providing solutions to Fortune 500 companies in the areas of Information Technology Consulting, ERP Software, Personnel Management, and Intern

I have designed and developed tree data structures that are a collection of nodes like a graph. It starts with a root node that has children nodes and similar nodes called grandfather nodes. In my current role, I do work with data table structures like Level Order Transversals and Depth First Transversals, so I'm quite familiar with how they work. My understanding of Depth First Search Algorithm for a binary tree is that a tree is a graph that has no cycles (with a cycle being a path in the graph that starts and ends at the same vertex). A child node, on the other hand, has one parent. It is for this reason that trees are not a recursive data structure. This also applies to graphs for finding a path between two nodes, finding the shortest path from one node to another, and finding the shortest path that visits all nodes, respectively.

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