The Minimum Spanning Tree Problem

Get introduced to the minimum spanning tree problem.

Defining the problem

The minimum spanning tree (MST) problem deals with connected, weighted, undirected graphs G=(V,E,w)G = (V, E, w). Here, the weights can be interpreted as costs, and the goal is to select some subset of edges FEF \subseteq E that connect the nodes of VV in a cost-optimal way. In particular, we want

  • FF contains enough edges such that they connect all nodes of VV
  • the total cost of the edges in FF is as small as possible.

As an example, consider the following weighted graph:

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