ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Gap-Hamming problem

The gap-hamming problem is a tricky problem that involves matching up strings of letters with slight differences between them. Imagine you have two pieces of paper with letters written on them. One says "cat" and the other says "bat". You can see that they are very similar, but they have a small difference - just one letter!

The gap-hamming problem is about finding pairs of strings that are very similar but have a specific number of differences between them - this number is called the "gap". For example, you might be looking for pairs of strings that have a gap of 2 - this means that there are two letters that are different between the two strings.

To solve the gap-hamming problem, you need to compare all possible pairs of strings and count how many differences there are between each pair. If the number of differences matches the gap you are looking for, then you have found a pair that matches the problem!

It might sound easy, but as you start comparing longer and more complex strings, the number of possible pairs grows very quickly, making the problem much more difficult.