To review briefly: a tree is defined as being either null or a root node with pointers .left to a left child and .right to a right child, where each child is in turn a tree, the root node appears in neither child, and no node appears in both children. The depth of a node is the number of pointers that must be followed to reach it from the root node. The height of a tree is -1 if it's null or else the maximum depth of a node that appears in it. A leaf is a node whose children are null.
First let me note the two distinct definitions of "balanced" proposed by answerers of the linked question.
EL-balanced A tree is EL-balanced if and only if, for every node v, |height(v.left) - height(v.right)| <= 1.
This is the balance condition for AVL trees.
DF-balanced A tree is DF-balanced if and only if, for every pair of leaves v, w, we have |depth(v) - depth(w)| <= 1. As DF points out, DF-balance for a node implies DF-balance for all of its descendants.
DF-balance is used for no algorithm known to me, though the balance condition for binary heaps is very similar, requiring additionally that the deeper leaves be as far left as possible.
I'm going to outline three approaches to testing balance.
Size bounds for balanced trees
Expand the recursive function to have an extra parameter, maxDepth. For each recursive call, pass maxDepth - 1, so that maxDepth roughly tracks how much stack space is left. If maxDepth reaches 0, report the tree as unbalanced (e.g., by returning "infinity" for the height), since no balanced tree that fits in main memory could possibly be that tall.
This approach relies on an a priori size bound on main memory, which is available in practice if not in all theoretical models, and the fact that no subtrees are shared. (PROTIP: unless you're very careful, your subtrees will be shared at some point during development.) We also need height bounds on balanced trees of at most a given size.
EL-balanced Via mutual induction, we prove a lower bound, L(h), on the number of nodes belonging to an EL-balanced tree of a given height h.
The base cases are
L(-1) = 0
L(0) = 1,
more or less by definition. The inductive case is trickier. An EL-balanced tree of height h > 0 is a node with an EL-balanced child of height h - 1 and another EL-balanced child of height either h - 1 or h - 2. This means that
L(h) = 1 + L(h - 1) + min(L(h - 2), L(h - 1)).
Add 1 to both sides and rearrange.
L(h) + 1 = L(h - 1) + 1 + min(L(h - 2) + 1, L(h - 1) + 1).
A little while later (spoiler), we find that
L(h) <= phi^(h + 2)/sqrt(5),
where phi = (1 + sqrt(5))/2 ~ 1.618.
maxDepth then should be set to the floor of the base-phi logarithm of the maximum number of nodes, plus a small constant that depends on fenceposty things.
DF-balanced Rather than write out an induction proof, I'm going to appeal to your intuition that the worst case is a complete binary tree with one extra leaf on the bottom. Then the proper setting for maxDepth is the base-2 logarithm of the maximum number of nodes, plus a small constant.
Iterative deepening depth-first search
This is the theoretician's version of the answer above. Because, for some reason, we don't know how much RAM our computer has (and with logarithmic space usage, it's not as though we need a tight bound), we again include the maxDepth parameter, but this time, we use it to truncate the tree implicitly below the specified depth. If the height of the tree comes back below the bound, then we know that the algorithm ran successfully. Alternatively, if the truncated tree is unbalanced, then so is the whole tree. The problem case is when the truncated tree is balanced but with height equal to maxDepth. Then we increase maxDepth and retry.
The simplest retry strategy is to increase maxDepth by 1 every time. Since balanced trees with n nodes have height O(log n), the running time is O(n log n). In fact, for DF-balanced trees, the running time is also O(n), since, except for the last couple traversals, the size of the truncated tree increases by a factor of 2 each time, leading to a geometric series.
Another strategy, doubling maxDepth each time, gives an O(n) running time for EL-balanced trees, since the largest tree of height h, with 2^(h + 1) - 1 nodes, is much smaller than the smallest tree of height 2h, with approximately (phi^2)^h nodes. The downside of doubling is that we may use twice as much stack space. With increase-by-1, however, in the family of minimum-size EL-balanced trees we constructed implicitly in defining L(h), the number of nodes at depth h - k in the tree of height h is polynomial of degree k. Accordingly, the last few scans will incur some superlinear term.
Temporarily mutating pointers
If there are parent pointers, then it's easy to traverse depth-first in place, because the parent pointers can be used to derive the relevant information on the stack in an efficient manner. If we don't have parent pointers but can mutate the tree temporarily, then, for descent into a child, we can cannibalize the pointer to that child to store temporarily the node's parent. The problem is determining on the way up whether we came from a left or a right child. If we can sneak a bit (say because pointers are 2-byte aligned, or because there's a spare bit in the balance factor, or because we're copying the tree for stop-and-copy garbage collection and can determine which arena we're in), then that's one way. Another test assumes that the tree is a binary search tree. It turns out that we don't need additional assumptions, however: Explain Morris inorder tree traversal without using stacks or recursion .
The one fly in the ointment is that this approach only works, as far as I know, on DF-balance, since there's no space on the stack to put the partial results for EL-balance.
