Greedy-reduction from Shortest Linear Superstring to Shortest Circular Superstring

Abstract

A superstring of a set of strings correspond to a string which contains all the other strings as substrings. The problem of finding the Shortest Linear Superstring is a well-know and well-studied problem in stringology. We present here a variant of this problem, the Shortest Circular Superstring problem where the sought superstring is a circular string. We show a strong link between these two problems and prove that the Shortest Circular Superstring problem is NP-complete. Moreover, we propose a new conjecture on the approximation ratio of the Shortest Circular Superstring problem.