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
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