# Creating a Distance Matrix solved by 1856

Nov. 12, 2012, 9:40 p.m. by Rosalind Team

Topics: Alignment, Phylogeny

## Introduction to Distance-Based Phylogeny

A number of different approaches are used to build phylogenies, each one featuring its own computational strengths and weaknesses. One of these measures is distance-based phylogeny, which constructs a tree from evolutionary distances calculated between pairs of taxa.

A wide assortment of different measures exist for quantifying this evolutionary distance. Once we have selected a distance function and used it to calculate the distance between every pair of taxa, we place these pairwise distance functions into a table.

In this problem, we will consider an evolutionary function based on Hamming distance. Recall from “Counting Point Mutations” that this function compares two homologous strands of DNA by counting the minimum possible number of point mutations that could have occurred on the evolutionary path between the two strands.

## Problem

For two strings $s_1$ and $s_2$ of equal length, the p-distance between them, denoted $d_p(s_1, s_2)$, is the proportion of corresponding symbols that differ between $s_1$ and $s_2$.

For a general distance function $d$ on $n$ taxa $s_1, s_2, \ldots, s_n$ (taxa are often represented by genetic strings), we may encode the distances between pairs of taxa via a distance matrix $D$ in which $D_{i,j} = d(s_i, s_j)$.

Given: A collection of $n$ ($n \leq 10$) DNA strings $s_1, \ldots, s_n$ of equal length (at most 1 kbp). Strings are given in FASTA format.

Return: The matrix $D$ corresponding to the p-distance $d_p$ on the given strings. As always, note that your answer is allowed an absolute error of 0.001.

## Sample Dataset

>Rosalind_9499
TTTCCATTTA
>Rosalind_0942
GATTCATTTC
>Rosalind_6568
TTTCCATTTT
>Rosalind_1833
GTTCCATTTA


## Sample Output

0.00000 0.40000 0.10000 0.10000
0.40000 0.00000 0.40000 0.30000
0.10000 0.40000 0.00000 0.20000
0.10000 0.30000 0.20000 0.00000