Untangling Binary Trees via Rotations
José Mendes Lucas · The Computer Journal · 2004
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.