Lecture

ON

Backtracking

V.Radhesyam
Assistant professor
Department of IT:VRSEC
 What is Backtracking
• Backtracking is a design technique used to
solve problems with large search space.

• Build a solution incrementally, one piece at

a time, removing those solutions that fail to
satisfy the constraints of the problem at
any point of time.

• Backtracking uses a data structure called

state space tree.
 What is 4-Queens Problem
• The 4-Queens Problem consists in placing
four queens on a 4 x 4 chessboard so that
no two queens can attack each other.
• That is, no two queens are allowed to be
placed on the same row, the same column
or the same diagonal.
• This problem can be solved by backtracking
 Complete State space Tree

4
Solution: State space Tree

x1=1 means Q1 Placed in first column

Chess board example
 Types of nodes
• Live node: A node which is generated and
the children are not yet generated is called
live node.

• E-node: The node whose children are

currently generated is called E-node.

• Dead node: A node which cannot further

extended is called dead node.
Control abstraction
 Graph coloring
• The problem is, given m colors, find a way of
coloring the vertices of a graph such that no two
adjacent vertices are colored using same color.
• This number is called chromatic number
 Hamilton cycles
• Hamiltonian Path in an undirected graph is a path that
visits each vertex exactly once. A Hamiltonian cycle is a
Hamiltonian Path such that there is an edge (in graph) from
the last vertex to the first vertex of the Hamiltonian Path