Branching factor

Branching factor

thumb|A red–black tree with branching factor 2

In computing, tree data structures, and game-theory, the branching factor is the number of children at each node, the outdegree. If this value is not uniform, an average branching factor can be calculated.

For example, in chess, if a "node" is considered to be a legal position, the average branching factor has been said to be about 35, and a statistical analysis of over 2.5 million games revealed an average of 31. This means that, on average, a player has about 31 to 35 legal moves at their disposal at each turn. By comparison, the average branching factor for the game Go is 250.

</references>