Revisiting Tree Isomorphism: AHU Algorithm with Primes Numbers

The AHU algorithm has been the state of the art since the 1970s for determining in linear time whether two unordered rooted trees are isomorphic or not. However, it has been criticized (by Campbell and Radford) for the way it is written, which requires several (re)readings to be understood, and does not facilitate its analysis. In this paper, we propose an alternative version of the AHU algorithm, which addresses this issue by being designed to be clearer to understand and implement, with the same theoretical complexity and equally fast in practice.. Whereas the key to the linearity of the original algorithm lay on the careful sorting of lists of integers, we replace this step by the multiplication of lists of prime numbers, and prove that this substitution causes no loss in the final complexity of the new algorithm.