Abstract
The shortest common superstring problem (SCS) is known to be NP-hard and APX-hard. The APX-hardness was proved for the SCS in [BJLTY94], but the reduction used in that paper produces instances with arbitrarily large alphabets. We show that the problem is APX-hard even if the size of the alphabet is 2.
A lot of results concerning approximation algorithms have been published. We use our result to establish the first explicit inapproximability results for the SCS.
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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Ott, S. (1999). Lower Bounds for Approximating Shortest Superstrings over an Alphabet of Size 2. In: Widmayer, P., Neyer, G., Eidenbenz, S. (eds) Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science. WG 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1665. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46784-X_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46784-X_7
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