【LeetCode】236. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary

236. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary

Description：
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).”
Note:
You may assume that all inputs are consist of lowercase letters a-z.
All inputs are guaranteed to be non-empty strings.
Difficulty：Medium
Given the following binary tree: root = [3,5,1,6,2,0,8,null,null,7,4]

Example:

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.

方法：递归

• Time complexity : $O\left(n\right)$
• Space complexity : $O\left(n\right)$
  思路：
  递归到最底层，如果路径中有要找的节点，返回true，如果一个节点的左右或者自己得到两个true，那么此节点就是最近祖先。

/**
 * 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* res;
    TreeNode* lowestCommonAncestor(TreeNode* root, TreeNode* p, TreeNode* q) {
        helper(root, p, q);
        return res;
    }
    
    bool helper(TreeNode* root, TreeNode* p, TreeNode* q){
        if(!root) return false;
        
        int left = helper(root->left, p, q) ? 1 : 0;
        int right = helper(root->right, p, q) ? 1 : 0;
        int self = (root == p || root == q) ? 1 : 0;
        if(left+self+right >= 2) res = root;
        return left+self+right > 0 ? true : false;
    }
};