Generating all possible trees of depth N?

Question

I have several different types of tree nodes, each of which may have anywhere from 0 to 5 children. I\'m trying to figure out an algorithm to generate all possible trees of

Answer 1

Here's a Python program I wrote up that I think does what you're asking. It'll return all of the possible trees given a starting node. Essentially, it boils down to a trick with bit manipulation: if a node has 5 children, then there are 2⁵ = 32 different possible subtrees as each child can independently be present or not present in a subtree.

Code:

#!/usr/bin/env python

def all_combos(choices):
    """
    Given a list of items (a,b,c,...), generates all possible combinations of
    items where one item is taken from a, one from b, one from c, and so on.

    For example, all_combos([[1, 2], ["a", "b", "c"]]) yields:

        [1, "a"]
        [1, "b"]
        [1, "c"]
        [2, "a"]
        [2, "b"]
        [2, "c"]
    """
    if not choices:
        yield []
        return

    for left_choice in choices[0]:
        for right_choices in all_combos(choices[1:]):
            yield [left_choice] + right_choices

class Node:
    def __init__(self, value, children=[]):
        self.value    = value
        self.children = children

    def all_subtrees(self, max_depth):
        yield Node(self.value)

        if max_depth > 0:
            # For each child, get all of its possible sub-trees.
            child_subtrees = [list(self.children[i].all_subtrees(max_depth - 1)) for i in range(len(self.children))]

            # Now for the n children iterate through the 2^n possibilities where
            # each child's subtree is independently present or not present. The
            # i-th child is present if the i-th bit in "bits" is a 1.
            for bits in xrange(1, 2 ** len(self.children)):
                for combos in all_combos([child_subtrees[i] for i in range(len(self.children)) if bits & (1 << i) != 0]):
                    yield Node(self.value, combos)

    def __str__(self):
        """
        Display the node's value, and then its children in brackets if it has any.
        """
        if self.children:
            return "%s %s" % (self.value, self.children)
        else:
            return str(self.value)

    def __repr__(self):
        return str(self)

tree = Node(1,
[
    Node(2),
    Node(3,
    [
        Node(4),
        Node(5),
        Node(6)
    ])
])

for subtree in tree.all_subtrees(2):
    print subtree

Here's a graphical representation of the test tree:

  1
 / \
2   3
   /|\
  4 5 6

And here's the output from running the program:

1
1 [2]
1 [3]
1 [3 [4]]
1 [3 [5]]
1 [3 [4, 5]]
1 [3 [6]]
1 [3 [4, 6]]
1 [3 [5, 6]]
1 [3 [4, 5, 6]]
1 [2, 3]
1 [2, 3 [4]]
1 [2, 3 [5]]
1 [2, 3 [4, 5]]
1 [2, 3 [6]]
1 [2, 3 [4, 6]]
1 [2, 3 [5, 6]]
1 [2, 3 [4, 5, 6]]

If you'd like I could translate this into a different language. You didn't specify so I used Python; the code would be a bit more verbose in Java or C++ or whatever since I took advantage of Python's list comprehensions in a big way.