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Decode the Coding Interview in Python: Real-World Examples

Flip Equivalent Binary Trees

Explore how to determine if two binary trees are flip equivalent by recursively comparing their subtrees with possible flipped children. Understand the base cases, recursive logic, and time and space complexity to sharpen your tree manipulation skills.

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Description

Let’s start by defining what a flip operation for a binary tree is. We can define it as:

“Choosing any node and swapping the right and left child subtrees.”

A binary tree, T, is flip equivalent to another binary tree, S, if we can make T equal to S after some number of flip operations.

Given the roots of two binary trees, root1 and root2, you have to find out whether the trees are flip equivalent to each other or not. The flipEquiv function should return True if the binary trees are equivalent. Otherwise, it will return False.

Example

Let’s look at the example below:

Coding exercise

Files
main.py
TreeNode.py
Python 3.5
from TreeNode import *
def flipEquiv(root1, root2):
    pass
Flip equivalent binary tree

Solution

We implement the flipEquiv function using recursion. Like any recursive function, we start by defining the base conditions. We have two base conditions:

  1. If root1 or root2 is null, they are equivalent if and only if they are both null.

  2. If root1 and root2 have different values, they aren’t ...