Lecture notes on Shortest Superstring Problem

So far we have studied the set covering problem, but not looked at any real life applications. The shortest superstring problem takes as input, several strings of different lengths and finds the shortest string that contains all the input strings as substrings. This is helpful in the genome project since it will allow researchers to determine entire coding regions from a collection of fragmented sections. We will look at the set covering problem as a way to solve the shortest superstring problem.