The term "branching factor" typically refers to a concept in tree structures, search algorithms, and graph theory, and it describes the number of child nodes or successors that a given node can have. More specifically, in the context of search trees used in algorithms like depth-first search (DFS) or breadth-first search (BFS), the branching factor indicates how many options or paths are available at each step of the exploration.
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The number of children of a node in a search tree, or an upper bound on that number over the tree. With branching factor at most and depth at most , a complete traversal visits at most nodes.