What's the difference between the data structure Tree and Graph?

Question

Academically speaking, what\'s the essential difference between the data structure Tree and Graph? And how about the tree based search and Graph based search?

Answer 1

Trees are obvious: they're recursive data structures consisting of nodes with children.

Map (aka dictionary) are key/value pairs. Give a map a key and it will return the associated value.

Maps can be implemented using trees, I hope you don't find that confusing.

UPDATE: Confusing "graph" for "map" is very confusing.

Graphs are more complex than trees. Trees imply recursive parent/child relationships. There are natural ways to traverse a tree: depth-first, breadth-first, level-order, etc.

Graphs can have uni-directional or bi-directional paths between nodes, be cyclic or acyclic, etc. I would consider graphs to be more complex.

I think a cursory search in any decent data structures text (e.g. "Algorithms Design Manual") would give more and better information than any number of SO answers. I would recommend that you not take the passive route and start doing some research for yourself.