A cubic algorithm for the generalized rank median of three genomes

The area of genome rearrangements has given rise to a number of interesting biological, mathematical and algorithmic problems. Among these, one of the most intractable ones has been that of finding the median of three genomes, a special case of the ancestral reconstruction problem. In this work we re-examine our recently proposed way of measuring genome rearrangement distance, namely, the rank distance between the matrix representations of the...