133. Clone Graph

Text Summary

To solve this problem, utilize one key variable and follow four essential steps:

Key Variable:
The ‘checked’ variable is a map that tracks the previous node as the ‘key’ and the corresponding new node as the ‘value’:

checked = {}

Four essential steps:

1. Check if the current node is ‘None’ or has been visited (present in ‘checked’). If so, return ‘None’ or the value of the checked variable for the current node:

if not node:
    return None
if node in checked:
    return checked[node]

2. Create a new node and associate it with the current node in the ‘checked’ map:

clone = Node(node.val, [])
checked[node] = clone

3. Iterate through the neighbors of the current node, recursively creating and connecting new nodes for them:

for n in node.neighbors:
         clone.neighbors.append(dfs(n))

4. Return the ‘clone’ variable, representing the new node:

return clone

Code Summary

"""
# Definition for a Node.
class Node(object):
    def __init__(self, val = 0, neighbors = None):
        self.val = val
        self.neighbors = neighbors if neighbors is not None else []
"""

class Solution(object):
    def cloneGraph(self, node):
        """
        :type node: Node
        :rtype: Node
        """
        checked = {}
        def dfs(node):
            if not node:
                return None
            if node in checked:
                return checked[node]
            clone = Node(node.val, [])
            checked[node] = clone
            for n in node.neighbors:
                clone.neighbors.append(dfs(n))
            return clone
        return dfs(node)