What does the term “branching factor” refer to in BFS?

The term "branching factor" in the context of Breadth-First Search (BFS) specifically refers to the maximum number of children that each node can have in a search tree. This concept is crucial in understanding how the search process expands; for instance, if a node has a branching factor of three, it can generate three child nodes during its evaluation. As BFS explores every level of the tree uniformly, the branching factor directly influences the total number of nodes that will be generated and examined at each level.

In this way, a higher branching factor can lead to an exponential increase in the number of nodes processed, significantly affecting the efficiency and space complexity of the search algorithm. Thus, knowing the branching factor helps in analyzing the overall performance of BFS and can inform decisions about its applicability in different problem contexts.