LeetCode-235. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Search Tree

https://leetcode.com/problems/lowest-common-ancestor-of-a-binary-search-tree/

Given a binary search tree (BST), find the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of two given nodes in the BST.

According to the definition of LCA on Wikipedia: “The lowest common ancestor is defined between two nodes v and w as the lowest node in T that has both v and w as descendants (where we allow a node to be a descendant of itself).”

        _______6______
       /              \
    ___2__          ___8__
   /      \        /      \
   0      _4       7       9
         /  \
         3   5

For example, the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of nodes 2 and 8 is 6. Another example is LCA of nodes 2 and 4 is 2, since a node can be a descendant of itself according to the LCA definition.

Solution

# Definition for a binary tree node.
# class TreeNode(object):
#     def __init__(self, x):
#         self.val = x
#         self.left = None
#         self.right = None

class Solution(object):
    def lowestCommonAncestor(self, root, p, q):
        """
        :type root: TreeNode
        :type p: TreeNode
        :type q: TreeNode
        :rtype: TreeNode
        """
        while True:
            if root.val > p.val and root.val > q.val:
                root = root.left
            elif root.val < p.val and root.val < q.val:
                root = root.right
            else:
                return root