On the maximum agreement subtree conjecture for balanced trees

Abstract

We give a counterexample to the conjecture of Martin and Thatte that two balanced rooted binary leaf-labelled trees on $n$ leaves have a maximum agreement subtree (MAST) of size at least $n^{\frac{1}{2}}$. In particular, we show that for any $c>0$, there exist two balanced rooted binary leaf-labelled trees on $n$ leaves such that any MAST for these two trees has size less than $c n^{\frac{1}{2}}$. We also improve the lower bound of the size of such a MAST to $n^{\frac{1}{6}}$.