The increasing recognition that symbioses have greatly altered evolution through genome fusions is creating a need for algorithms that can reliably detect and reconstruct fusions. Here, we generalize the bootstrappers gambit algorithm (a quartet method) in order to permit it to analyze both bifurcations and fusions under a single mathematical model, and thereby detect past genomic branchings an...

This paper presents a technique that supports a knowledge engineer in constructing a qualitative model of a physical device . The technique is specifically aimed at achieving a parsimonious model of device behaviour. First we explain why a model that is composed of general model fragments may still contain irrelevant particles . Then we present a technique that removes these irrelevant model pa...

In phylogenetic analysis, for non-molecular data, particularly morphology, parsimony optimization is the most commonly employed approach. In the past and present application of the parsimony principle, extra step numbers have been added across different characters without proper justification. This practice, however, has caused the impacts of characters to be inflated or deflated without a vali...