How do I convert between a measure of similarity and a measure of difference (distance)?

Question

Is there a general way to convert between a measure of similarity and a measure of distance?

Consider a similarity measure like the number of 2-grams that two strings ha

Answer 1

If your similarity measure (s) is between 0 and 1, you can use one of these:

1-s
sqrt(1-s)
-log(s)
(1/s)-1