Formal Definition
Formally, DFS is an uninformed search that progresses by expanding the first child node of the search tree that appears and thus going deeper and deeper until a goal node is found, or until it hits a node that has no children. Then the search backtracks, returning to the most recent node it hasn't finished exploring. In a non-recursive implementation, all freshly expanded nodes are added to a stack for exploration.
Read more about this topic: Depth-first Search
Famous quotes containing the words formal and/or definition:
“The formal Washington dinner party has all the spontaneity of a Japanese imperial funeral.”
—Simon Hoggart (b. 1946)
“The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.”
—William James (1842–1910)