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Pokémon® Cards And The Shortest Common Superstring, Mark Stamp, Austin Stamp

Faculty Publications, Computer Science

Evidence is presented that certain sequences of Pokémon cards are determined by selecting consecutive elements from a longer sequence. We then consider the problem of recovering the shortest common superstring (SCS), i.e., the shortest string that contains each of the Pokémon card sequences as a consecutive substring. The SCS problem arises in many applications, most notably in DNA sequencing.