binary-treegraph-theorycomputer-science-theory

How to check if two binary trees share a node


Given an array of binary trees find whether any two trees share a node, not value wise, but "pointer" wise. At the bottom I provided an example.

My approach was to iterate through all the trees and store all the leaves (pointers) from each tree into a list, then check if list has any duplicates, but that's a rather slow approach. Is there perhaps a quicker way to solve this?

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Solution

  • In the worst case you will have to traverse all nodes (all pointers) to find a shared node (pointer), as it might happen to be the last one visited. So the best time complexity we can expect to have is O(𝑚+𝑛) where 𝑚 and 𝑛 represent the number of nodes in either tree.

    We can achieve this time complexity if we store the pointers from the first tree in a hash set and then traverse the pointers of the second tree to see if any of those is in the set. Assuming that get/set operations on a hash set have an amortized constant time complexity, the overal time complexity will be O(𝑚+𝑛).

    If the same program is responsible for constructing the trees, then a reuse of the same node can be detected upon insertion. For instance, reuse of the same node in multiple trees can be completely avoided by having the insert method of your tree only take a value as argument, never a node instance. The method will then encapsulate the actual creation of the node, guaranteeing its uniqueness.