LeetCode:Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree(update)

Given a binary tree, find the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of two given nodes in the tree.

According to the definition of LCA on Wikipedia: “The lowest common ancestor is defined between two nodes v and w as the lowest node in T that has both v and w as descendants (where we allow a node to be a descendant of itself).”

        _______3______
       /              \
    ___5__          ___1__
   /      \        /      \
   6      _2       0       8
         /  \
         7   4

For example, the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of nodes 5 and 1 is 3. Another example is LCA of nodes 5 and 4 is 5, since a node can be a descendant of itself according to the LCA definition.

Solution 1：

A Bottom-up Approach (Worst case O(n) ):
Using a bottom-up approach, we can improve over the top-down approach by avoiding traversing the same nodes over and over again.

We traverse from the bottom, and once we reach a node which matches one of the two nodes, we pass it up to its parent. The parent would then test its left and right subtree if each contain one of the two nodes. If yes, then the parent must be the LCA and we pass its parent up to the root. If not, we pass the lower node which contains either one of the two nodes (if the left or right subtree contains either p or q), or NULL (if both the left and right subtree does not contain either p or q) up.

Sounds complicated? Surprisingly the code appears to be much simpler than the top-down one.

/**
 * Definition for a binary tree node.
 * struct TreeNode {
 *     int val;
 *     TreeNode *left;
 *     TreeNode *right;
 *     TreeNode(int x) : val(x), left(NULL), right(NULL) {}
 * };
 */
class Solution {
public:
    TreeNode* lowestCommonAncestor(TreeNode* root, TreeNode* p, TreeNode* q) {
        if(!root) return NULL;
        if(root==p||root==q) return root;
        TreeNode *left=lowestCommonAncestor(root->left,p,q);
        TreeNode *right=lowestCommonAncestor(root->right,p,q);
        if(left&&right)
            return root;
        else if(left)
            return left;
        else if(right)
            return right;
        else return NULL;
    }
    
};