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I'm scouring the internet for a definition of the term "Internal Node." I cannot find a succinct definition. Every source I'm looking at uses the term without defining it, and the usage doesn't yield a proper definition of what an internal node actually is.
Here are the two places I've been mainly looking: Link assumes that internal nodes are nodes that have two subtrees that aren't null, but doesn't say what nodes in the original tree are internal vs. external.
http://www.math.bas.bg/~nkirov/2008/NETB201/slides/ch06/ch06-2.html seems to insinuate that internal nodes only exist in proper binary trees and doesn't yield much useful information about them.
What actually is an internal node!?
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(definition) Definition: A node of a tree that has one or more child nodes, equivalently, one that is not a leaf. Also known as nonterminal node. See also parent, root.
Important Definitions for Binary Trees An external node is one without child branches, while an internal node has at least one child branch. The size of a binary tree refers to the number of nodes it has. The distance from a node B to the root node is the level of B.
Nodes with no children are called leaves, or external nodes. Nodes which are not leaves are called internal nodes. Nodes with the same parent are called siblings.
A node that does have children is known as an internal node. The root is an internal node, except in the special case of a tree that consists of just one node (and no edges).
I ROOT (root is also an INTERNAL NODE, unless it is leaf) / \ I I INTERNAL NODES / / \ o o o EXTERNAL NODES (or leaves) As the wonderful picture shows, internal nodes are nodes located between the root of the tree and the leaves. Note that the root is also an internal node except in the case it's the only node of the tree.
What is said in one of the sites about an internal node having to have two children is for the tree to be a complete binary tree, not for the node to be internal.
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As far as i understand it, it is a node which is not a leaf.
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