The problem of finding the Lowest Common Ancestor (LCA) of a pair of nodes in a rooted tree has been studied more carefully in the second part of the 20th century and now is fairly basic in algorithmic graph theory. This problem is interesting not only for the tricky algorithms that can be used to solve it, but for its numerous applications in string processing and computational biology, for example, where LCA is used with suffix trees or other tree-like structures. Harel and Tarjan were the first to study this problem more attentively and they showed that after linear preprocessing of the input tree LCA, queries can be answered in constant time. Their work has since been extended, and this tutorial will present many interesting approaches that can be used in other kinds of problems as well.
Let's consider a less abstract example of LCA: the tree of life. It's a well-known fact that the current habitants of Earth evolved from other species. This evolving structure can be represented as a tree, in which nodes represent species, and the sons of some node represent the directly evolved species. Now species with similar characteristics are divided into groups. By finding the LCA of some nodes in this tree we can actually find the common parent of two species, and we can determine that the similar characteristics they share are inherited from that parent.
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