© 2004 by British Computer Society
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Untangling Binary Trees via Rotations
Department of Computer Science, State University of New York, College at Brockport, 350 New Campus Drive, Brockport, NY, 14420-2933, USA
In this paper we present a polynomial time algorithm for finding the shortest sequence of rotations that converts one binary tree into another when both binary trees are of a restricted form. The initial tree must be a degenerate tree, where every node has exactly one child, and the destination binary tree must also be degenerate, of a more restricted nature. Previous work on rotation distance has focused on approximation algorithms. Our algorithm is the only known non-trivial polynomial time algorithm for exact rotation distance between special cases of binary trees.
Received 29 October 2002. Revised 17 June 2003.