We could construct a phylogeny directly from a collection of partial splits, but
it is not immediately clear how many different splits we would need.
Hence, our first question is to ask how many quartets are required to
be able to infer a tree; in this problem we will ask the reverse question of how many
quartets can be inferred from a known tree.
Problem
A quartet AB∣CD is consistent with a binary treeT
if the quartet can be inferred from one of the splits of T (see “Quartets” for
a description of inferring quartets from splits).
Let q(T) denote the total number of quartets that are consistent with T.