Rotation distance measures the difference in shape between binary trees of
the same size by counting the minimum number of rotations needed to transform
one tree to the other. We describe several types of rotation distance where
restrictions are put on the locations where rotations are permitted, and
provide upper bounds on distances between trees with a fixed number of nodes
with respect to several families of these restrictions. These bounds are sharp
in a certain asymptotic sense and are obtained by relating each restricted
rotation distance to the word length of elements of Thompson's group F with
respect to different generating sets, including both finite and infinite
generating sets.Comment: 30 pages, 11 figures. This revised version corrects some typos and
has some clearer proofs of the results for the lower bounds and better
figure