June 03, 2005

Bijective Representations of Trees Using Cons Pairs

[Hacking_ Math_] --DRAFT-- Different ways of representing trees with list structure: We need to distinguish two things: the branching factor of the tree (binary vs variable), and whether internal nodes have any content. We are interested in one-to-one and onto (bijective) representations, any arbitrary list structure should correspond to a unique tree and vice versa.

1. Binary tree, no internal content: trivial representation with the cons pairs. A tree is a pair of two elements. An element is either an atom or another tree.
2. Variable branch, no internal content: simple representation given in the 6.001 tree lecture. A tree is a list of children. A list is a null terminated chain of cons pairs. A child is either an atom or another tree.
3. Binary tree, internal content: typical C representation would use a struct of three elements: left, right, and content. One possibility with cons pairs is to define a node as two pairs: (cons content (cons left right)). (is this bijective?)
4. Variable branch, internal content: SGF defines a format based on DFS walking (pre-order?) of the tree. Here is an EBNF definition:

GameTree = "(" Sequence { GameTree } ")"
Sequence = Node { Node }
Node = ";" { Property }

{...} represents 0 or more repetition. So a tree is a list of nodes followed by a list of trees. Each node is an atom.

A 1-branch tree gives simply a linked list. In terms of cons pairs: there are two types of pairs: node pairs have atom cars and tree pairs have pair cars. The car of a node pair is its content, the cdr may point to any type of pair or nil. The car of a tree pair is a node pair and its cdr is a tree pair or nil. There are never two open parens in a row so this is obviously not bijective.


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