543. Diameter of Binary Tree


Given a binary tree, you need to compute the length of the diameter of the tree. The diameter of a binary tree is the length of the longest path between any two nodes in a tree. This path may or may not pass through the root.

Example:
Given a binary tree

          1
         / \
        2   3
       / \     
      4   5    

Return 3, which is the length of the path [4,2,1,3] or [5,2,1,3].

Note: The length of path between two nodes is represented by the number of edges between them.


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Approach #1: Depth-First Search [Accepted]

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Intuition

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Any path can be written as two arrows (in different directions) from some node, where an arrow is a path that starts at some node and only travels down to child nodes.

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If we knew the maximum length arrows L, R for each child, then the best path touches L + R + 1 nodes.

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Algorithm

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Let\'s calculate the depth of a node in the usual way: max(depth of node.left, depth of node.right) + 1. While we do, a path "through" this node uses 1 + (depth of node.left) + (depth of node.right) nodes. Let\'s search each node and remember the highest number of nodes used in some path. The desired length is 1 minus this number.

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Complexity Analysis

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    Time Complexity: . We visit every node once.

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    Space Complexity: , the size of our implicit call stack during our depth-first search.

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Analysis written by: @awice.

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