A cardinal tree (or
trie
In computer science, a trie (, ), also known as a digital tree or prefix tree, is a specialized search tree data structure used to store and retrieve strings from a dictionary or set. Unlike a binary search tree, nodes in a trie do not store t ...
) of degree ''k'', by analogy with
cardinal number
In mathematics, a cardinal number, or cardinal for short, is what is commonly called the number of elements of a set. In the case of a finite set, its cardinal number, or cardinality is therefore a natural number. For dealing with the cas ...
s and by opposition with
ordinal trees, is a rooted tree in which each node has positions for an edge to a child.
[
"Representing trees of higher degree" (2005)
by David Benoit, Erik D. Demaine, J. Ian Munro, Rajeev Raman, Venkatesh Raman and S. Srinivasa Rao]
Each node has up to children and each child of a given node is labeled by a unique integer from the set {1, 2, . . . , k}. For instance, a
Binary Tree, binary tree is a cardinal tree of degree 2.
References
Data types
Trees (data structures)
Knowledge representation
Abstract data types