Shortest Superstring

In the Shortest Superstring problem (SS) one has to find a shortest string s containing given strings s1, . . . , sn as substrings. The problem is NP-hard, so a natural question is that of its approximability. One natural approach to approximately solving SS is the following GREEDY heuristic: repeatedly merge two strings with the largest overlap until only a single string is left. This heuristic is conjectured to be a 2-approximation, but even after 30 years since the conjecture has been posed, we are still very far from proving it. The situation is better for non-greedy approximation algorithms, where several approaches yielding 2.5-approximation (and better) are known. In this talk, we will survey the main results in the area, focusing on the fundamental ideas and intuitions. 1998 ACM Subject Classification F.2.2 Nonnumerical Algorithms and Problems