I don't know how to frame this problem, if anyone sees another way to explain it please, please mention it!

I have a set of variable length sequences which sometimes have common sub-sequences, I'd can arrange two sequences such that their common parts overlap.

Trivially I can remove all duplicates, and remove any "short" sequences which can be found inside a longer sequence.

Less trivially, I can combine sequences where the common sub-sequence is the beginning of one sequence and the end of another sequence

The problem now comes because if I use a greedy approach to this, I might combine two sequences in a way that precludes a third sequence from overlapping, while if I had maybe settled for a less greedy decision it may be possible that the 3rd sequence becomes a sub-sequence of the combined first two

Interesting progress: While I can prove that any arbitrary locally greedy choice may exclude reaching a global optimum... I can not prove whether or not there is a case where reaching the optimum requires a non-greedy decision

Are you after longest common substring? If not, could you give examples? Dynamic programming would be nice here.

Hey!!!

Does anyone of you know what Coding theory is about?

@Evinda data compression, error checking and so on, why?

@EvilJS I am thinking of taking the subject

@EvilJS Is Applied Algebra prerequisted?

@Evinda I have no idea. Everything depends on what will subject contain and how you are willing to learn.

@EvilJS Aha... Would you say that it is difficult?

Maybe you should take sylabus? Check what is the subject about? But if you want really to ask people opinion - take it, very cool subject, easy, operations on matrices are fun.

I loved error checking codes, at first I thought it is weird, but now I am using it at work.

@Evinda what do you study exactly?

@EvilJS I will start now with my master

Master of?

@EvilJS What job?

@EvilJS At th emathematics department. Maybe Mathematics of Computer science

Evaluating people emotions.

What do you mean? @EvilJS

Nvm. I did coding theory before masters. I really never get much of the choice - pick two subjects, only two were available.

Thanks for the information @EvilJS

@MickLH greedy algorithms often perform "surprisingly good" and sometimes further optimization is not worth the hassle or computational expense. it sounds like you want to create larger strings out of smaller ones. this general area is called "grammar compression".

@Evinda EJS uses EEGs to analyze brainwaves of humans.

congratulations on getting into a masters program. what kind of classes does your university have? it would be interesting to read about. do you have some idea of what you want to study in particular eg for the thesis? will it have a thesis?