Watch 10 video solutions for Count Paths That Can Form a Palindrome in a Tree, a hard level problem involving Dynamic Programming, Bit Manipulation, Tree. This walkthrough by Inside code has 224,588 views views. Want to try solving it yourself? Practice on FleetCode or read the detailed text solution.
You are given a tree (i.e. a connected, undirected graph that has no cycles) rooted at node 0 consisting of n nodes numbered from 0 to n - 1. The tree is represented by a 0-indexed array parent of size n, where parent[i] is the parent of node i. Since node 0 is the root, parent[0] == -1.
You are also given a string s of length n, where s[i] is the character assigned to the edge between i and parent[i]. s[0] can be ignored.
Return the number of pairs of nodes (u, v) such that u < v and the characters assigned to edges on the path from u to v can be rearranged to form a palindrome.
A string is a palindrome when it reads the same backwards as forwards.
Example 1:

Input: parent = [-1,0,0,1,1,2], s = "acaabc" Output: 8 Explanation: The valid pairs are: - All the pairs (0,1), (0,2), (1,3), (1,4) and (2,5) result in one character which is always a palindrome. - The pair (2,3) result in the string "aca" which is a palindrome. - The pair (1,5) result in the string "cac" which is a palindrome. - The pair (3,5) result in the string "acac" which can be rearranged into the palindrome "acca".
Example 2:
Input: parent = [-1,0,0,0,0], s = "aaaaa" Output: 10 Explanation: Any pair of nodes (u,v) where u < v is valid.
Constraints:
n == parent.length == s.length1 <= n <= 1050 <= parent[i] <= n - 1 for all i >= 1parent[0] == -1parent represents a valid tree.s consists of only lowercase English letters.