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General trees are not binary trees. It is the other way around, however, see the last paragraph for a different answer - explanation first...

A binary tree is one with two possible child nodes, a left node and a right node, either of which might be not present. This particular representation implies a certain order between the node and its children, and if you walk the tree from bottom left to bottom right, you will traverse the nodes in order.

A general tree is one with any number of possible child nodes, including no child nodes, so a binary tree is an example of a general tree, while a general tree is a generalization of a binary tree.

However, in the general tree, the meaning of the child nodes might not have any specific ordering, like those in a binary tree, unless the general tree has other information contained in the node about order, because the concept of left and right has no implied meaning when there are more than two children.

But, as promised, if the general tree has order, it is always possible to represent the general tree as a binary tree - there will just be more nodes, but they will only contain zero, one, or two children, and they will have an implied order.

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15y ago

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