236. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree

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 p and q as the lowest node in T that has both p and q as descendants (where we allow a node to be a descendant of itself).”

Given the following binary tree:  root = [3,5,1,6,2,0,8,null,null,7,4]

 

Example 1:

Input: root = [3,5,1,6,2,0,8,null,null,7,4], p = 5, q = 1
Output: 3
Explanation: The LCA of nodes 5 and 1 is 3.

Example 2:

Input: root = [3,5,1,6,2,0,8,null,null,7,4], p = 5, q = 4
Output: 5
Explanation: The LCA of nodes 5 and 4 is 5
, since a node can be a descendant of itself according to the LCA definition.

解题思路：

    此二叉树不满足标准二叉树定义，因此不能采用队列记录节点路径，找到公共路径即是 lowest common ancestor的方式。

   因此采用递归方式遍历所有节点，没找到p或q返回NULL，找到则返回节点地址，递归到最近公共节点时，返回 lowest common ancestor节点。

递归规则：

   left =NULL,right = NULL, return NULL;

   left =NULL,right = node, return node;

   left =node,right = NULL, return node;

解法一：
TreeNode* lowestCommonAncestor(TreeNode* root, TreeNode* p, TreeNode* q) {
    if (!root || root == p || root == q) return root;
    TreeNode* left = lowestCommonAncestor(root->left, p, q);
    TreeNode* right = lowestCommonAncestor(root->right, p, q);
    return !left ? right : !right ? left : root;  \\返回目标节点的地址
}

解法二：
TreeNode* lowestCommonAncestor(TreeNode* root, TreeNode* p, TreeNode* q) {
        if(root == NULL) return root;
        if(root->val > p->val && root->val > q->val) {
              return lowestCommonAncestor(root->left, p,q);
        }else  if(root->val < p->val && root->val < q->val) {
         return lowestCommonAncestor(root->right, p,q);
        }
        return root;
}