Category: Computer Science

I write specialized data structure software for bioinformatics. I use AI to help with this on a daily basis, and find that it speeds up my coding by quite a bit. But it’s not a 10x efficiency boost like some people are experiencing. I’ve been wondering why that is. Of course, it could be just […]

In 1988, Finnish computer scientists Esko Ukkonen and Jorma Tarhio conjectured that the simple greedy algorithm for shortest common superstring has a worst-case approximation ratio of 2. Amazingly, the problem is still open almost 40 years later, despite substantial efforts and partial results by many authors (see e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.20422v1 for a survey of what is […]