An effective p-adic encoding of dendrograms is presented through an explicit embedding into the Bruhat–Tits tree for a p-adic number field. This field depends on the number of children of a vertex and is a finite extension of the field of p-adic numbers. It is shown that fixing p-adic representatives of the residue field allows a natural way of encoding strings by identifying a given alphabet with such representatives. A simple p-adic hierarchic classification algorithm is derived for p-adic...

We discuss a number of distance functions encountered in the theory of computation, including metrics, ultra-metrics, quasi-metrics, generalized ultra-metrics, partial metrics, d-ultra-metrics and generalized metrics. We consider their properties, associated fixed-point theorems and some general applications they have within the theory of computation. We consider in detail the applications of generalized distance functions in giving a uniform treatment of several important semantics for...