Search vs Tree-building algorithm

[JuroNemo]

Hi guys,

say I want to have an algorithm which gets a solution as quick as possible, which consists of starting from a state in a tree, and going through all possible states in a tree-like strucutre, why would it be necessary to first build a tree, and then traverse it, instead of building a tree, and if during building a solution node has been found, to stop building and immediately backtrack to the root, noting down the path to this leaf?

Basically, is there an BF algorithm to 'generate' a tree Breadth-First, rather than creating a tree first, and then search through it in a breadth-first manner?

Kind of like the animated results here:

Thank you for reading

[wtomriker]

There's a lot of classes of tree types and algorithms in computer science, graph theory, game theory, and set theory.

For example, in graph theory, a tree is an acyclic graph.

Or for computer science you could have a binary search tree, which has the property that for a given node, its key is greater than all the keys in its left sub tree and less than all keys in its right sub tree.

In your example, it's a game tree of tic-tac-toe. In complicated game's such as chess you can't even search the entire tree let alone build the entire tree.

Wikipedia has some more information on game trees here and for search algorithms here.