title: 'Introduction to Graph Traversal' description: 'Understand graphs, graph traversal, and why BFS and DFS are fundamental algorithms for exploring connected data.' course: algorithms module: 'BFS vs DFS' order: 1 gate: public draft: false date: '2026-10-01' tags:

• graphs
• graph-traversal
• bfs
• dfs
• algorithms

Introduction to Graph Traversal

Graphs are one of the most important data structures in computer science.

They are used to represent relationships between entities such as:

• Users connected on a social network
• Cities connected by roads
• Web pages connected by links
• Servers connected in a network
• Courses connected by prerequisites
• Dependencies between software packages

To work with a graph, we often need to visit its nodes systematically.

This process is called graph traversal.

In this module, we will focus on two fundamental graph traversal algorithms:

• Breadth-First Search (BFS)
• Depth-First Search (DFS)

What Is a Graph?

A graph is a collection of vertices (nodes) connected by edges.

For example:

A ----- B
|       |
|       |
C ----- D