1026. Maximum Difference Between Node and Ancestor

Given the root of a binary tree, find the maximum value v for which there exist different nodes a and b where v = |a.val - b.val| and a is an ancestor of b.

A node a is an ancestor of b if either: any child of a is equal to b or any child of a is an ancestor of b.

 

Example 1:

Input: root = [8,3,10,1,6,null,14,null,null,4,7,13]
Output: 7
Explanation: We have various ancestor-node differences, some of which are given below :
|8 - 3| = 5
|3 - 7| = 4
|8 - 1| = 7
|10 - 13| = 3
Among all possible differences, the maximum value of 7 is obtained by |8 - 1| = 7.

Example 2:

Input: root = [1,null,2,null,0,3]
Output: 3

 

Constraints:

• The number of nodes in the tree is in the range [2, 5000].
• 0 <= Node.val <= 105

---

# Definition for a binary tree node.
# class TreeNode:
#     def __init__(self, val=0, left=None, right=None):
#         self.val = val
#         self.left = left
#         self.right = right
class Solution:
    def maxAncestorDiff(self, root: Optional[TreeNode]) -> int:
        self.ans=0
        
        def dfs(node, cmax, cmin):
            if not node:
                return
            self.ans=max(self.ans, abs(cmax-node.val), abs(cmin-node.val))
            cmax=max(node.val,cmax)
            cmin=min(node.val,cmin)
            dfs(node.left, cmax, cmin)
            dfs(node.right, cmax, cmin)
        dfs(root,root.val,root.val)
        return self.ans