CYOA books were how I independently discovered the concept of the Depth-First Search, and (because I had a finite number of fingers i.e. bookmarks i.e. active m

CYOA books were how I independently discovered the concept of the Depth-First Search, and (because I had a finite number of fingers i.e. bookmarks i.e. active memory) the inclination to guess which branch would end in death or an already-explored node sooner so I could prune the DAG. A lot of people learn these concepts with mazes or with FPS shooter games in story mode where they're navigating an unfamiliar 2D or 3D branching space, and the narrative version is a lot more abstract, but I think about it every time I'm teaching tree search or graph search.