Solution: House Robber III
Understand how to apply backtracking to solve the House Robber III challenge, maximizing the money stolen from houses represented as tree nodes without alerting the police. This lesson guides you through an optimized approach to recursively evaluate valid combinations and improve efficiency over naive methods.
Statement
A thief has discovered a new neighborhood to target, where the houses can be represented as nodes in a binary tree, and the money in the house is the data of the respective node. The thief can enter the neighborhood from a house represented as root of the binary tree. Each house has only one parent house. The thief knows that if he robs two houses that are directly connected, the police will be notified. The thief wants to know the maximum amount of money he can steal from the houses without getting caught by the police. The thief needs your help determining the maximum amount of money he can rob without alerting the police.
Constraints:
- The number of nodes in the tree is in the range