"Family Tree" Data Structure

data structure for Family tree

Is it homework?

Even if it's called “Tree”, It's a bad structure : imagine two brother who marry two sisters.

A general graph structure would be the best (a tree being a specific form of a graph). The edge would carry the relationship. Then you can run a path finding algorithm (like good old dijkstra) only on edges which represent blood relationship.

And boost::graph is a very good library.

Which data structure to use to implement family tree in ruby?

I could figure out a way to get minimum relations using RubyTree itself. RubyTree has inbuilt methods like parent, siblings, children etc and also we can pass content to the nodes.
So I used these to get what I want. For example for creating a spouse I created a child node to the root node and passed a hash like {relation: spouse} in the content. In this way I am able to apply logic by putting conditions on this hash and get the relations that I want

example:

tina = Tree::TreeNode.new('Tina', {gender: 'female', relation: 'root'})
mike = tina << Tree::TreeNode.new('Mike', {gender: 'male', relation: 'spouse'}) 
sofi = tina << Tree::TreeNode.new('sofi', {gender: 'female', relation: 'child'})
...... #add all children and their children like this

puts "--------siblings of sofi--------"
siblings_of_sofi.each do |sib|
    if sib.content[:relation] == 'child'
        puts sib.name
    end
end

# assume tina has 4 sons and one of them is bob and alice is daughter of bob. 
puts "--------alice paternal uncles--------"
puts alice.parent.name
puts alice.parent.content
if alice.parent.content[:relation] == 'spouse'
    father = alice.parent.parent #as per the question child should be added through mother only, therefore alice is added as a child to bob's wife and bob's wife is added as a child to bob as {relation: spouse}
    uncles = father.siblings
    uncles.each do |uncle|
        puts uncle.name if uncle.content[:gender] == 'male' && uncle.content[:relation] == 'child'
    end

end

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