In theoretical computer science, closest string is the name of an NP-hard computational problem, which tries to find the geometrical center of a set of input strings.
To understand the word "center" it is necessary to define a distance between two strings. Usually, this problem is studied with the Hamming distance in mind.
Read more about Closest String: Formal Definition, Motivation, Simplifications and Data Reductions, Approximability, Fixed-parameter Tractability, Relations To Other Problems
Famous quotes containing the words closest and/or string:
“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)