Five surprising properties of parsimoniously colored trees (Q1346424)

Motivated by a desire to better understand the properties of the maximum parsimony method for tree reconstruction, we have derived a number of exact and explicit formulae involving the length function. It turns out that these formulae have some surprising aspects, such as being independent of tree shape, or possessing unexpected asymptotic behaviour. Such formulae provide a more efficient and accurate way than computer- based simulation to estimate statistical properties of the parsimony method under the null model of random data; the results also provide a considerable simplification of previously published formulae for the expected length of a random leaf bicoloration.