  Let T be a triangulation of a simple polygon. A flip in T is the operation of
removing one diagonal of T and adding a different one such that the resulting
graph is again a triangulation. The flip distance between two triangulations is
the smallest number of flips required to transform one triangulation into the
other. For the special case of convex polygons, the problem of determining the
shortest flip distance between two triangulations is equivalent to determining
the rotation distance between two binary trees, a central problem which is
still open after over 25 years of intensive study. We show that computing the
flip distance between two triangulations of a simple polygon is NP-complete.
This complements a recent result that shows APX-hardness of determining the
flip distance between two triangulations of a planar point set.
