branching factor

In a {{tree} the branching factor of a node refers to the number of branches/children of the node. For the tree as a whole this may be fixed (e.g. a branching factor of 2 for a binary tree) or may vary between nodes (as is often the case in search trees). One may therefore talk about a maximum or average branching factor of a tree. For example, for the first move in Go there are 19x19 possible moves, so the branching factor at the root is 361 (although some are equivalent).

. In a directed graph , that is when the links/arcs between nodes have a direction, one can talk about the forward and backward branching factors. The former is the number of outward links and the latter the numer of inward links.