How to check if a binary tree is balanced
Question 4.1 of Cracking the Coding Interview:
Implement a function to check if a binary tree is balanced. For the purposes of this question, a balanced tree is defined to be a tree such that the heights of the two subtrees of any node never differ by more than one.
To implement this, we can just translate the English definition into a given programming language. Here it is in Haskell:
module BalancedTree where import qualified Data.Maybe data Tree = Leaf | Branch Tree Tree isBalanced :: Tree -> Bool isBalanced Leaf = True isBalanced (Branch l r) = isBalanced l && isBalanced r && diff (height l) (height r) <= 1 height :: Tree -> Int height Leaf = 0 height (Branch l r) = max (height l) (height r) + 1 diff n m = abs (n-m)
This naive translation gives an
which is not too bad.
But it does a linear-time amount of work at each node
to calculate the heights of each subtree.
But we can reduce the work at each node to constant time,
by passing up a
height from the recursive calls.
This gives us an
module BalancedTree where import qualified Data.Maybe data Tree = Leaf | Branch Tree Tree isBalanced :: Tree -> Bool isBalanced = Data.Maybe.isJust . isBalancedWithHeight isBalancedWithHeight :: Tree -> Maybe Int isBalancedWithHeight Leaf = Just 0 isBalancedWithHeight (Branch l r) = do lh <- isBalancedWithHeight l rh <- isBalancedWithHeight r if diff lh rh <= 1 then Just $ max lh rh + 1 else Nothing diff n m = abs (n-m) main :: IO () main = print $ all id [ isBalanced Leaf, isBalanced (Branch Leaf Leaf), isBalanced (Branch (Branch Leaf Leaf) Leaf), not $ isBalanced (Branch Leaf (Branch Leaf (Branch Leaf Leaf))) ]
How did I work out that the naive algorithm is
I actually did it by noticing “this looks like a sorting algorithm”,
in that it makes recursive sub-calls then does a linear amount of work,
then remembering that "these sorting algorithms are
A more principled way is to write out the recurrence relation,
T(n) = 2*T(n/2) + n,
then use magic master theorem.
I’m sure I’ll have to learn the master theorem properly in a future question from this book.
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