What is the space complexity of the recursive implementation of inorder traversa
Practice Questions
Q1
What is the space complexity of the recursive implementation of inorder traversal?
O(1)
O(n)
O(log n)
O(n log n)
Questions & Step-by-Step Solutions
What is the space complexity of the recursive implementation of inorder traversal?
Step 1: Understand what inorder traversal is. It is a way to visit all the nodes in a binary tree in a specific order: left child, then the node itself, and then the right child.
Step 2: Recognize that a recursive implementation of inorder traversal means that the function calls itself to visit the left child, then processes the current node, and finally calls itself to visit the right child.
Step 3: Know that each time a function calls itself, it adds a new layer to the call stack. This is like stacking boxes on top of each other.
Step 4: In the worst case, if the tree is very unbalanced (like a linked list), the maximum number of function calls (or stack layers) will be equal to the number of nodes in the tree, which is 'n'.
Step 5: Therefore, the space used by the call stack in the worst case is O(n), where 'n' is the number of nodes in the tree.
Step 6: In a balanced tree, the space complexity is still O(n) because we still need to account for the maximum depth of the recursion.
