Algorithm to find lowest common ancestor in directed acyclic graph?

Question

Imagine a directed acyclic graph as follows, where:

• \"A\" is the root (there is always exactly one root)
• each node knows its parent(s)
• the no

Answer 1

Assume that you want to find the ancestors of x and y in a graph.

Maintain an array of vectors- parents (storing parents of each node).

1. Firstly do a bfs(keep storing parents of each vertex) and find all the ancestors of x (find parents of x and using parents, find all the ancestors of x) and store them in a vector. Also, store the depth of each parent in the vector.

2. Find the ancestors of y using same method and store them in another vector. Now, you have two vectors storing the ancestors of x and y respectively along with their depth.

3. LCA would be common ancestor with greatest depth. Depth is defined as longest distance from root(vertex with in_degree=0). Now, we can sort the vectors in decreasing order of their depths and find out the LCA. Using this method, we can even find multiple LCA's (if there).