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by roelschroeven 2611 days ago
Sometimes IT and biology share some jargon, or at least they share the words but not exactly the meaning.

Both in IT and biology a collection of trees is called a forest. In IT, if you take a tree and remove the root, the result is a forest. Biologists don't agree.

4 comments

Don't forget the nut metaphor.

* https://superuser.com/a/329479/38062

By the way, did you know that broad-leaved trees are infinitely large during winter? The proof is really easy to do for yourself: In winter, those trees don't have any leaves, so all nodes must be inner nodes, and you can easily show by induction that the height of the tree must be infinite.
Well, the biological angle kind of makes sense if you think of it as taking the branches from a big tree, without the roots and successfully planting them in the ground individually. It doesn't quite work that way in practice, but if it did, you would get a small forest.
> In IT, if you take a tree and remove the root, the result is a forest. Biologists don't agree.

Unless it's Pando:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)