ALGODAILY

August 15, 2020

If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.

- Robert Sewell

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Day 9: Lowest Common Ancestor

You're given a binary search tree and two of its child nodes as parameters. Can you write a method lowestCommonAncestor(root: Node, node1: Node, node2: Node) to identify the lowest common ancestor of the two nodes? The lowest common ancestor is the deepest node that has both of the two nodes as descendants.

In the below example, the lowest common ancestor of node 5 and 8 is 7.

/*
       7
      / \
     4   8
    / \
   1   5
*/

The method will called in the following manner: lowestCommonAncestor(root, node1, node2);.

You can assume our standard node definition for the tree vertices:

function Node(val) {
  this.val = val;
  this.left = this.right = null;
}

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As always, you can see the solution and a full step by step explanation at this link.

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