We study the problem of indexing a text T[1..n] ∈ Σn so that, later, given a query regular expression pattern R of size m = |R|, we can report all the occ substrings T[i..j] of T matching R. The problem is known to be hard for arbitrary patterns R, so in this paper, we consider the following two types of patterns. (1) Character-class Kleene-star patterns of the form P1D∗P2, where P1 and P2 are strings and D = {c1, . . ., ck} ⊂ Σ is a character-class (shorthand for the regular expression (c1|c2|··· |ck)) and (2) String Kleene-star patterns of the form P1P∗P2 where P, P1 and P2 are strings. In case (1), we describe an index of O(nlog1+ε n) space (for any constant ε > 0) solving queries in time O(m + log n/log log n + occ) on constant-sized alphabets. We also describe a general solution for any alphabet size. This result is conditioned on the existence of an anchor: a character of P1P2 that does not belong to D. We justify this assumption by proving that no efficient indexing solution can exist if an anchor is not present unless the Set Disjointness Conjecture fails. In case (2), we describe an index of size O(n) answering queries in time O(m + (occ + 1) logε n) on any alphabet size.

A fundamental concept related to strings is that of repetitions. It has been extensively studied in many versions, from both purely combinatorial and algorithmic angles. One of the most basic questions is how many distinct squares, i.e., distinct strings of the form UU, a string of length n can contain as fragments. It turns out that this is always 𝒪(n), and the bound cannot be improved to sublinear in n [Fraenkel and Simpson, JCTA 1998]. Several similar questions about repetitions in strings have been considered, and by now we seem to have a good understanding of their repetitive structure. For higher-dimensional strings, the basic concept of periodicity has been successfully extended and applied to design efficient algorithms - it is inherently more complex than for regular strings. Extending the notion of repetitions and understanding the repetitive structure of higher-dimensional strings is however far from complete. Quartics were introduced by Apostolico and Brimkov [TCS 2000] as analogues of squares in two dimensions. Charalampopoulos, Radoszewski, Rytter, Waleń, and Zuba [ESA 2020] proved that the number of distinct quartics in an n×n 2D string is 𝒪(n²log²n) and that they can be computed in 𝒪(n²log²n) time. Gawrychowski, Ghazawi, and Landau [SPIRE 2021] constructed an infinite family of n×n 2D strings with Ω(n²log n) distinct quartics. This brings the challenge of determining asymptotically tight bounds. Here, we settle both the combinatorial and the algorithmic aspects of this question: the number of distinct quartics in an n×n 2D string is 𝒪(n²log n) and they can be computed in the worst-case optimal 𝒪(n²log n) time. As expected, our solution heavily exploits the periodic structure implied by occurrences of quartics. However, the two-dimensional nature of the problem introduces some technical challenges. Somewhat surprisingly, we overcome the final challenge for the combinatorial bound using a result of Marcus and Tardos [JCTA 2004] for permutation avoidance on matrices.

We present a compressed representation of tries based on top tree compression [ICALP 2013] that works on a standard, comparison-based, pointer machine model of computation and supports efficient prefix search queries. Namely, we show how to preprocess a set of strings of total length n over an alphabet of size $$\sigma$$ into a compressed data structure of worst-case optimal size $$O(n/\log _\sigma n)$$ that given a pattern string P of length m determines if P is a prefix of one of the strings in time $$O(\min (m\log \sigma ,m + \log n))$$ . We show that this query time is in fact optimal regardless of the size of the data structure. Existing solutions either use $$\Omega (n)$$ space or rely on word RAM techniques, such as tabulation, hashing, address arithmetic, or word-level parallelism, and hence do not work on a pointer machine. Our result is the first solution on a pointer machine that achieves worst-case o(n) space. Along the way, we develop several interesting data structures that work on a pointer machine and are of independent interest. These include an optimal data structures for random access to a grammar-compressed string and an optimal data structure for a variant of the level ancestor problem.

A tandem repeat is an occurrence of two adjacent identical substrings. In this paper, we introduce the notion of a double string, which consists of two parallel strings, and we study the problem of locating all tandem repeats in a double string. The problem introduced here has applications beyond actual double strings, as we illustrate by solving two different problems with the algorithm of the double string tandem repeats problem. The first problem is that of finding all corner-sharing tandems in a 2-dimensional text, defined by Apostolico and Brimkov. The second problem is that of finding all scaled tandem repeats in a 1d text, where a scaled tandem repeat is defined as a string UU' such that U' is discrete scale of U. In addition to the algorithms for exact tandem repeats, we also present algorithms that solve the problem in the inexact sense, allowing up to k mismatches. We believe that this framework will open a new perspective for other problems in the future.

Given two indeterminate equal-length strings p and t with a set of characters per position in both strings, we obtain a determinate string p_w from p and a determinate string t_w from t by choosing one character per position. Then, we say that p and t match when p_w and t_w match for some choice of the characters. While the most standard notion of a match for determinate strings is that they are simply identical, in certain applications it is more appropriate to use other definitions, with the prime examples being parameterized matching, order-preserving matching, and the recently introduced Cartesian tree matching. We provide a systematic study of the complexity of string matching for indeterminate equal-length strings, for different notions of matching. We use n to denote the length of both strings, and r to be an upper-bound on the number of uncertain characters per position. First, we provide the first polynomial time algorithm for the Cartesian tree version that runs in deterministic 𝒪(nlog² n) and expected 𝒪(nlog nlog log n) time using 𝒪(nlog n) space, for constant r. Second, we establish NP-hardness of the order-preserving version for r=2, thus solving a question explicitly stated by Henriques et al. [CPM 2018], who showed hardness for r=3. Third, we establish NP-hardness of the parameterized version for r=2. As both parameterized and order-preserving indeterminate matching reduce to the standard determinate matching for r=1, this provides a complete classification for these three variants.

We introduce a new metric of match, called Cartesian tree matching, which means that two strings match if they have the same Cartesian trees. Based on Cartesian tree matching, we define single pattern matching for a text of length n and a pattern of length m, and multiple pattern matching for a text of length n and k patterns of total length m. We present an O(n+m) time algorithm for single pattern matching, and an O((n+m) log k) deterministic time or O(n+m) randomized time algorithm for multiple pattern matching. We also define an index data structure called Cartesian suffix tree, and present an O(n) randomized time algorithm to build the Cartesian suffix tree. Our efficient algorithms for Cartesian tree matching use a representation of the Cartesian tree, called the parent-distance representation.

Maximal repetitions or runs in strings have a wide array of applications and thus have been extensively studied. In this paper, we extend this notion to 2-dimensions, precisely defining a maximal 2D repetition. We provide initial bounds on the number of maximal 2D repetitions that can occur in a matrix. The main contribution of this paper is the presentation of the first algorithm for locating all maximal 2D repetitions in a matrix. The algorithm is efficient and straightforward, with runtime O(n^2 log n log log n+ rho log n), where n^2 is the size of the input, and rho is the number of 2D repetitions in the output.

A consensus tree is a phylogenetic tree that captures the similarity between a set of conflicting phylogenetic trees. The problem of computing a consensus tree is a major step in phylogenetic tree reconstruction. It also finds applications in predicting a species tree from a set of gene trees. This paper focuses on two of the most well-known and widely used oconsensus tree methods: the greedy consensus tree and the frequency difference consensus tree. Given $k$ conflicting trees each with $n$ leaves, the previous fastest algorithms for these problems were $O(k n^2)$ for the greedy consensus tree [J. ACM 2016] and $\tilde O(\min \{ k n^2, k^2n\})$ for the frequency difference consensus tree [ACM TCBB 2016]. We improve these running times to $\tilde O(k n^{1.5})$ and $\tilde O(k n)$ respectively.

We revisit the fundamental problem of dictionary look-up with mismatches. Given a set (dictionary) of $d$ strings of length $m$ and an integer $k$, we must preprocess it into a data structure to answer the following queries: Given a query string $Q$ of length $m$, find all strings in the dictionary that are at Hamming distance at most $k$ from $Q$. Chan and Lewenstein (CPM 2015) showed a data structure for $k = 1$ with optimal query time $O(m/w + occ)$, where $w$ is the size of a machine word and $occ$ is the size of the output. The data structure occupies $O(w d \log^{1+\varepsilon} d)$ extra bits of space (beyond the entropy-bounded space required to store the dictionary strings). In this work we give a solution with similar bounds for a much wider range of values $k$. Namely, we give a data structure that has $O(m/w + \log^k d + occ)$ query time and uses $O(w d \log^k d)$ extra bits of space.

We start a systematic study of data structures for the nearest colored node problem on trees. Given a tree with colored nodes and weighted edges, we want to answer queries (v,c) asking for the nearest node to node v that has color c. This is a natural generalization of the well-known nearest marked ancestor problem. We give an O(n)-space O(log log n)-query solution and show that this is optimal. We also consider the dynamic case where updates can change a node's color and show that in O(n) space we can support both updates and queries in O(log n) time. We complement this by showing that O(polylog n) update time implies Omega(log n \ log log n) query time. Finally, we consider the case where updates can change the edges of the tree (link-cut operations). There is a known (top-tree based) solution that requires update time that is roughly linear in the number of colors. We show that this solution is probably optimal by showing that a strictly sublinear update time implies a strictly subcubic time algorithm for the classical all pairs shortest paths problem on a general graph. We also consider versions where the tree is rooted, and the query asks for the nearest ancestor/descendant of node v that has color c, and present efficient data structures for both variants in the static and the dynamic setting.

Grammar-based compression, where one replaces a long string by a small context-free grammar that generates the string, is a simple and powerful paradigm that captures (sometimes with slight reduction in efficiency) many of the popular compression schemes, including the Lempel--Ziv family, run-length encoding, byte-pair encoding, Sequitur, and Re-Pair. In this paper, we present a novel grammar representation that allows efficient random access to any character or substring without decompressing the string. Let $S$ be a string of length $N$ compressed into a context-free grammar $\mathcal{S}$ of size $n$. We present two representations of $\mathcal{S}$ achieving $O(\log N)$ random access time, and either $O(n\cdot\alpha_k(n))$ construction time and space on the pointer machine model, or $O(n)$ construction time and space on the RAM. Here, $\alpha_k(n)$ is the inverse of the $k$th row of Ackermann's function. Our representations also efficiently support decompression of any substring in $S$: we can decompress any substring of length $m$ in the same complexity as a single random access query and additional $O(m)$ time. Combining these results with fast algorithms for uncompressed approximate string matching leads to several efficient algorithms for approximate string matching on grammar-compressed strings without decompression. For instance, we can find all approximate occurrences of a pattern $P$ with at most $k$ errors in time $O(n(\min\{|P|k,k^4+|P|\}+\log N)+\mathrm{occ})$, where $\mathrm{occ}$ is the number of occurrences of $P$ in $S$. Finally, we generalize our results to navigation and other operations on grammar-compressed ordered trees. All of the above bounds significantly improve the currently best known results. To achieve these bounds, we introduce several new techniques and data structures of independent interest, including a predecessor data structure, two “biased” weighted ancestor data structures, and a compact representation of heavy paths in grammars.

BACKGROUND: Identifying sequence-structure motifs common to two RNAs can speed up the comparison of structural RNAs substantially. The core algorithm of the existent approach ExpaRNA solves this problem for a priori known input structures. However, such structures are rarely known; moreover, predicting them computationally is no rescue, since single sequence structure prediction is highly unreliable. RESULTS: The novel algorithm ExpaRNA-P computes exactly matching sequence-structure motifs in entire Boltzmann-distributed structure ensembles of two RNAs; thereby we match and fold RNAs simultaneously, analogous to the well-known "simultaneous alignment and folding" of RNAs. While this implies much higher flexibility compared to ExpaRNA, ExpaRNA-P has the same very low complexity (quadratic in time and space), which is enabled by its novel structure ensemble-based sparsification. Furthermore, we devise a generalized chaining algorithm to compute compatible subsets of ExpaRNA-P's sequence-structure motifs. Resulting in the very fast RNA alignment approach ExpLoc-P, we utilize the best chain as anchor constraints for the sequence-structure alignment tool LocARNA. ExpLoc-P is benchmarked in several variants and versus state-of-the-art approaches. In particular, we formally introduce and evaluate strict and relaxed variants of the problem; the latter makes the approach sensitive to compensatory mutations. Across a benchmark set of typical non-coding RNAs, ExpLoc-P has similar accuracy to LocARNA but is four times faster (in both variants), while it achieves a speed-up over 30-fold for the longest benchmark sequences (≈400nt). Finally, different ExpLoc-P variants enable tailoring of the method to specific application scenarios. ExpaRNA-P and ExpLoc-P are distributed as part of the LocARNA package. The source code is freely available at http://www.bioinf.uni-freiburg.de/Software/ExpaRNA-P . CONCLUSIONS: ExpaRNA-P's novel ensemble-based sparsification reduces its complexity to quadratic time and space. Thereby, ExpaRNA-P significantly speeds up sequence-structure alignment while maintaining the alignment quality. Different ExpaRNA-P variants support a wide range of applications.

Detecting local common sequence-structure regions of RNAs is a biologically important problem. Detecting such regions allows biologists to identify functionally relevant similarities between the inspected molecules. We developed dynamic programming algorithms for finding common structure-sequence patterns between two RNAs. The RNAs are given by their sequence and a set of potential base pairs with associated probabilities. In contrast to prior work on local pattern matching of RNAs, we support the breaking of arcs. This allows us to add flexibility over matching only fixed structures; potentially matching only a similar subset of specified base pairs. We present an O(n(3)) algorithm for local exact pattern matching between two nested RNAs, and an O(n(3) log n) algorithm for one nested RNA and one bounded-unlimited RNA. In addition, an algorithm for approximate pattern matching is introduced that for two given nested RNAs and a number k, finds the maximal local pattern matching score between the two RNAs with at most k mismatches in O(n(3)k(2)) time. Finally, we present an O(n(3)) algorithm for finding the most similar subforest between two nested RNAs.

Let S be a string of length N compressed into a context-free grammar S of size n. We present two representations of S achieving O(log N) random access time, and either O(n · αk(n)) construction time and space on the pointer machine model, or O(n) construction time and space on the RAM. Here, αk(n) is the inverse of the kth row of Ackermann's function. Our representations also efficiently support decompression of any substring in S: we can decompress any substring of length m in the same complexity as a single random access query and additional O(m) time. Combining these results with fast algorithms for uncompressed approximate string matching leads to several efficient algorithms for approximate string matching on grammar-compressed strings without decompression. For instance, we can find all approximate occurrences of a pattern P with at most k errors in time O(n(min{|P|k, k +|P|} +log N) + occ), where occ is the number of occurrences of P in S. Finally, we are able to generalize our results to navigation and other operations on grammar-compressed trees. All of the above bounds significantly improve the currently best known results. To achieve these bounds, we introduce several new techniques and data structures of independent interest, including a predecessor data structure, two “biased” weighted ancestor data structures, and a compact representation of heavy-paths in grammars.

The haplotype inference problem (HIP) asks to find a set of haplotypes which resolve a given set of genotypes. This problem is important in practical fields such as the investigation of diseases or other types of genetic mutations. In order to find the haplotypes which are as close as possible to the real set of haplotypes that comprise the genotypes, two models have been suggested which are by now well-studied: The perfect phylogeny model and the pure parsimony model. All known algorithms up till now for haplotype inference may find haplotypes that are not necessarily plausible, i.e., very rare haplotypes or haplotypes that were never observed in the population. In order to overcome this disadvantage, we study in this paper, a new constrained version of HIP under the above-mentioned models. In this new version, a pool of plausible haplotypes H is given together with the set of genotypes G, and the goal is to find a subset H ⊆ H that resolves G. For constrained perfect phlogeny haplotyping (CPPH), we provide initial insights and polynomial-time algorithms for some restricted cases of the problem. For constrained parsimony haplotyping (CPH), we show that the problem is fixed parameter tractable when parameterized by the size of the solution set of haplotypes.

The edit distance problem is a classical fundamental problem in computer science in general, and in combinatorial pattern matching in particular. The standard dynamic-programming solution for this problem computes the edit-distance between a pair of strings of total length $O(N)$ in $O(N^2)$ time. To this date, this quadratic upper-bound has never been substantially improved for general strings. However, there are known techniques for breaking this bound in case the strings are known to compress well under a particular compression scheme. The basic idea is to first compress the strings, and then to compute the edit distance between the compressed strings. As it turns out, practically all known $o(N^2)$ edit-distance algorithms work, in some sense, under the same paradigm described above. It is therefore natural to ask whether there is a single edit-distance algorithm that works for strings which are compressed under any compression scheme. A rephrasing of this question is to ask whether a single algorithm can exploit the compressibility properties of strings under any compression method, even if each string is compressed using a different compression. In this paper we set out to answer this question by using \emph{straight-line programs}. These provide a generic platform for representing many popular compression schemes including the LZ-family, Run-Length Encoding, Byte-Pair Encoding, and dictionary methods. For two strings of total length $N$ having straight-line program representations of total size $n$, we present an algorithm running in $O(n^{1.4}N^{1.2})$ time for computing the edit-distance of these two strings under any rational scoring function, and an $O(n^{1.34}N^{1.34})$-time algorithm for arbitrary scoring functions. This improves on a recent algorithm of Tiskin that runs in $O(nN^{1.5})$ time, and works only for rational scoring functions.

In this article, we address a new version of dynamic pattern matching. The dynamic text and static pattern matching problem is the problem of finding a static pattern in a text that is continuously being updated. The goal is to report all new occurrences of the pattern in the text after each text update. We present an algorithm for solving the problem where the text update operation is changing the symbol value of a text location. Given a text of length n and a pattern of length m , our algorithm preprocesses the text in time O ( n log log m ), and the pattern in time O ( m log m ). The extra space used is O ( n + m log m ). Following each text update, the algorithm deletes all prior occurrences of the pattern that no longer match, and reports all new occurrences of the pattern in the text in O (log log m ) time. We note that the complexity is not proportional to the number of pattern occurrences, since all new occurrences can be reported in a succinct form.

Given two strings of size n over a constant alphabet, the classical algorithm for computing the similarity between two sequences [D. Sankoff and J. B. Kruskal, eds., {Time Warps, String Edits, and Macromolecules}; Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1983; T. F. Smith and M. S. Waterman, { J.\ Molec.\ Biol., 147 (1981), pp. 195-197] uses a dynamic programming matrix and compares the two strings in O(n 2 ) time. We address the challenge of computing the similarity of two strings in subquadratic time for metrics which use a scoring matrix of unrestricted weights. Our algorithm applies to both {local} and {global} similarity computations. The speed-up is achieved by dividing the dynamic programming matrix into variable sized blocks, as induced by Lempel-Ziv parsing of both strings, and utilizing the inherent periodic nature of both strings. This leads to an $O(n^2 / \log n)$, algorithm for an input of constant alphabet size. For most texts, the time complexity is actually $O(h n^2 / \log n)$, where $h \le 1$ is the entropy of the text. We also present an algorithm for comparing two {run-length} encoded strings of length m and n, compressed into m' and n' runs, respectively, in O(m'n + n'm) complexity. This result extends to all distance or similarity scoring schemes that use an additive gap penalty.

MOTIVATION: One of the major features of genomic DNA sequences, distinguishing them from texts in most spoken or artificial languages, is their high repetitiveness. Variation in the repetitiveness of genomic texts reflects the presence and density of different biologically important messages. Thus, deviation from an expected number of repeats in both directions indicates a possible presence of a biological signal. Linguistic complexity corresponds to repetitiveness of a genomic text, and potential regulatory sites may be discovered through construction of typical patterns of complexity distribution. RESULTS: We developed software for fast calculation of linguistic sequence complexity of DNA sequences. Our program utilizes suffix trees to compute the number of subwords present in genomic sequences, thereby allowing calculation of linguistic complexity in time linear in genome size. The measure of linguistic complexity was applied to the complete genome of Haemophilus influenzae. Maps of complexity along the entire genome were obtained using sliding windows of 40, 100, and 2000 nucleotides. This approach provided an efficient way to detect simple sequence repeats in this genome. In addition, local profiles of complexity distribution around the starts of translation were constructed for 21 complete prokaryotic genomes. We hypothesize that complexity profiles correspond to evolutionary relationships between organisms. We found principal differences in profiles of the GC-rich and other (non-GC-rich) genomes. We also found characteristic differences in profiles of AT genomes, which probably reflect individual species variations in translational regulation. AVAILABILITY: The program is available upon request from Alexander Bolshoy or at http://csweb.haifa.ac.il/library/#complex.

The problem of comparing two sequences A and B to determine their longest common subsequence (LCS) or the edit distance between them has been much studied. In this paper we consider the following incremental version of these problems: given an appropriate encoding of a comparison between A and B, can one incrementally compute the answer for A and bB, and the answer for A and Bb with equal efficiency, where b is an additional symbol? Our main result is a theorem exposing a surprising relationship between the dynamic programming solutions for two such "adjacent" problems. Given a threshold k on the number of differences to be permitted in an alignment, the theorem leads directly to an O(k) algorithm for incrementally computing a new solution from an old one, as contrasts the O(k 2 ) time required to compute a solution from scratch. We further show, with a series of applications, that this algorithm is indeed more powerful than its nonincremental counterpart. We show this by solving the applications with greater asymptotic efficiency than heretofore possible. For example, we obtain O(nk) algorithms for the longest prefix approximate match problem, the approximate overlap problem, and cyclic string comparison.

Let a text string T of n symbols and a pattern string P of m symbols from alphabet /spl Sigma/ be given. A swapped version T' of T is a length n string derived from T by a series of local swaps, (i.e. t/sup '//sub l//spl larr/t/sub l+1/ and t'/sub l+1//spl larr/t/sub l/) where each element can participate in no more than one swap. The Pattern Matching with Swaps problem is that of finding all locations i for which there exists a swapped version T' of T where there is an exact matching of P in location i of T'. It has been an open problem whether swapped matching can be done in less than O(mn) time. In this paper we show the first algorithm that solves the pattern matching with swaps problem in time O(mn). We present an algorithm whose time complexity is O(nm/sup 1/3/ log m log/sup 2/ /spl sigma/) for a general alphabet /spl Sigma/, where /spl sigma/=min(m, |/spl Sigma/|).

Our main result in this paper is a parallel algorithm for suffix-prefix- ($s - p$-) matching that has optimal speedup on a concurrent-read/concurrent-write parallel random-access machine (CRCW PRAM). Given a string of length m, the algorithm runs in time $O(\log m)$ using ${m / {\log m}}$ processors. This algorithm is important because we utilize s–p matching as a fundamental building block to solve several pattern- and string-matching problems, such as the following: 1. string matching; 2. multitext/multipattern string matching; 3. multidimensional pattern matching; 4. pattern-occurrence detection; 5. on-line string matching. In particular, our techniques and algorithms are the first to preserve optimal speedup in the context of pattern matching in higher dimensions and are the only known ones to do so for dimensions $d > 2$.

A general framework for solving multiple-line history queries is presented. The authors address two important historical queries in this environment: the vertical query and the horizontal query. The vertical query enables a design team to find what its design was at a past instant on its own path of evolution, while the horizontal query provides a design team with the designs of relevant teams at concurrent times in the past.>

A parallel computation approach to two-dimensional shape recognition is proposed and illustrated. The approach uses parallel techniques for contour extraction, parallel computation of normalized contour-based feature strings independent of scale and orientation, and parallel string-matching algorithms. The string matching can be applied in a manner independent of rotation. An implementation on the exclusive read, exclusive write parallel random access memory (EREW PRAM) architecture is discussed, but it can be adapted to other parallel architectures. An illustrated example is presented.>

In this paper we introduce a new network model called a muZtimedia network.It combines the point-to-point message passing network and the multiaccess channel.To benefit from the combination we design algorithms which consist of two stages: a local stage which utilizes the parallelism of the point-to-point network and a global stage which utilizes the broadcast capability of the multiaccess channel.As a reasonable approach, one wishes to balance the complexities of the two stages by obtaining an efficient partition of the network 'AT&T Bell Labs.

Given two sequences, a pattern of length m, a text of length n and a positive integer k, we give two algorithms. The first finds all occurrences of the pattern in the text as long as these do not differ from each other by more than k differences. It runs in O(nk) time. The second algorithm finds all subsequence alignments between the pattern and the test with at most k differences. This algorithm runs in O(nmk) time, is very simple and easy to program.

In this paper we consider a synchronous broadcasting network, a distributed computation model which represents communication networks that are used extensively in practice. We consider a basic problem of information sharing: the computation of the multiple identification function. That is, given a network of p processors, each of which contains an n-bit string of information, how can every processor compute efficiently the subset of processors which have the same information as itself? The problem was suggested by Yao as a generalization of the two-processor case studied in his classic paper on distributed computing (Yao, 1979). The naive way to solve this problem takes O(np) communication time, where a time unit is the time to transfer one bit. We present an algorithm which takes advantage of properties of strings and is O(n log2 p + p) time. A simulation of sorting networks by the distributed model yields an O(n log p + p) (impractical) algorithm. By applying Yao's probabilistic implementation of the two-processor case to both algorithm we get probabilistic versions (with small error) where n is replaced by log n in the complexity expressions. We also present lower bounds for the problem: an Ω(n) and an Ω(p) bound are shown.

Consider the string matching problem where differences between characters of the pattern and characters of the text are allowed. Each difference is due to either a mismatch between a character of the text and a character of the pattern or a superfluous character in the text or a superfluous character in the pattern. Given a text of length n, a pattern of length m and an integer k, we present an algorithm for finding all occurrences of the pattern in the text, each with at most k differences. The algorithm runs in O(m2 + k2n) time. Given the same input we also present an algorithm for finding all occurrences of the pattern in the text, each with at most k mismatches (superfluous characters in either the text or the pattern are not allowed). This algorithm runs in O(k(m logm + n)) time.