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Problem 8 - Count Unival Trees

The problem statement is as follows:

A unival tree (which stands for “universal value”) is a tree where all nodes under it have the same value. Given the root to a binary tree, count the number of unival subtrees.

For example, the following tree has 5 unival subtrees:

  0
 / \
1   0
   / \
  1   0
 / \
1   1

NOTE: All the code in this post, including this write-up itself, can be found or generated from the GitHub repository.

Solution

The solution has two major parts:

Assumptions

The solution makes the following assumptions:

According to Wikipedia, a full binary tree is defined as follows:

A full binary tree (sometimes referred to as a proper or plane binary tree) is a tree in which every node has either 0 or 2 children. Another way of defining a full binary tree is a recursive definition. A full binary tree is either:

Data model

Here is the data structure used to hold the Tree:

pub enum Tree {
  Leaf(bool),
  Branch(bool, Box<Tree>, Box<Tree>),
}

The sub-trees are Boxed so that the compiler knows the size of a Branch when one is created.

Algorithm

The solution performs a depth-first search to find unival trees, going down the “left” side of the tree first. Each function call takes a tree, specifically a Box<Tree>, as input. The output is a tuple consisting of an Option and an integer, (Option<bool>, i32). If the Option is holding a value, it indicates that the sub-tree which was analyzed is a unival tree and the value represents the boolean value of that unival tree. The integer represents the number of unival trees found so far as part of the search.

pub(in crate) fn depth_first_search_helper(
  tree: Box<Tree>,
) -> (Option<bool>, i32) {
  match *tree {
    Tree::Leaf(x) => (Option::from(x), 1),
    Tree::Branch(x, lt, rt) => {
      // Count the number of univals along the left child.
      let (l_unival, l_count) = depth_first_search_helper(lt);

      // Count the number of univals along the right child.
      let (r_unival, r_count) = depth_first_search_helper(rt);

      match (l_unival, r_unival) {
        // If the left or right sub-trees don't have the same value, then
        // just send over any counts from both sub-trees.
        (None, _) => (None, l_count + r_count),
        (_, None) => (None, l_count + r_count),

        // If the left and sub-trees both have the same values within their
        // respective sub-trees, check if the two sub-trees have the same
        // value and if it matches the current node.
        (Some(lv), Some(rv)) =>
          if lv == rv && lv == x {
            (Some(x), l_count + r_count + 1)
          } else {
            (None, l_count + r_count)
          },
      }
    }
  }
}

Testing

This code was tested using the example provided by the original problem and by using property-based testing. Unfortunately, since there is only one implementation of the algorithm, it is difficult to independently verify the results. The property-based testing checked for two main properties:

Benchmarking

The solution was benchmarked in two ways:

  1. Execution time was benchmarked using Criterion.rs.
  2. Memory usage was benchmarked using Valgrind Massif

Strategy

To benchmark the application, I used input values from 1 to 20 to indicate the number of levels in the input’s tree. Values, i.e. the bool stored within each node, were picked randomly using the rand package.

For benchmarking purposes, the system produces “perfect” binary trees, i.e. binary trees where all interior nodes are Branches and all Leafs have the same depth. Even though the answer (in terms of unival trees) will vary for each execution, the number of nodes that are being iterated will remain the same. This may produce some variance in results, but could potentially reveal anomalies over multiple benchmark runs. For completely deterministic results, some strategies include using the same values for all nodes or alternating values by depth.

Results

The following line chart depicts CPU usage against the number of elements in the tree.

Comparison of time vs elements

The following chart depicts memory usage against the number of elements in the tree.

Comparison of memory vs elements

Conclusion

This project marked a few “firsts” for me:

  1. Using cargo-make to manage builds, documentation, and benchmarks. I expect to use it a lot more going forward.

  2. Using Valgrind Massify to benchmark memory usage. I also learned that massif-visualizer and ms_print interpret “peaks” differently in the snapshots, leading to different understanding of program behavior when it comes to memory usage. Personally, I prefer massif-visualizer because it correctly identified the snapshots with the greatest memory usage (as a sum of heap and stack space).

  3. Using Rust to quickly generate recursive data structures without prototyping them in another language first (such as F#). I hope this is a sign that I am getting at least a little more comfortable with the language.

I originally wrote out the solution on a piece of paper while on a long flight (using pseudocode), and I’m glad to see that the algorithm I wrote there worked with minimal changes being required. Converting that pseudocode into Rust was a lot of fun, and there was a decent amount of wrestling with the compiler to get this to work. However, it was a good challenge and I’m looking forward to more.

See you in the next one!

Appendix A - Chart data

The following table shows the data used to create the above memory benchmark chart in Gnumeric. All numbers are in bytes, except the element count.

Elements Total (B) Useful Heap Extra Heap Stack
2 167,779,000 100,665,510 67,109,042 4,448
4 167,779,728 100,665,984 67,109,232 4,512
8 167,780,584 100,666,602 67,109,574 4,408
16 167,782,000 100,667,529 67,109,895 4,576
32 167,783,744 100,668,591 67,110,633 4,520
64 167,787,264 100,670,821 67,111,739 4,704
128 167,792,448 100,673,928 67,113,816 4,704
256 167,803,688 100,680,746 67,118,118 4,824
512 167,822,000 100,691,820 67,125,508 4,672
1,024 167,862,000 100,716,227 67,140,941 4,832
2,048 167,939,936 100,762,825 67,172,023 5,088
4,096 168,107,136 100,863,087 67,238,897 5,152
8,192 168,370,928 101,021,429 67,344,475 5,024
16,384 169,037,368 101,421,288 67,611,056 5,024
32,768 169,893,848 101,935,562 67,953,382 4,904
65,536 172,712,472 103,626,428 69,080,636 5,408
131,072 178,122,752 106,872,547 71,244,733 5,472
262,144 186,988,728 112,193,353 74,790,223 5,152
524,288 208,617,856 125,170,799 83,441,857 5,200
1,048,576 249,538,088 149,722,922 99,809,918 5,248