Today we learn ropes associated with comparing strings.

1. Searching.
   1. BLAST: A linear approach to a quadratic problem.
   2. Searching for an organism (here's SARS, as a text file).
   3. Searching for something similar to an organism.
2. Dynamic programming.
   1. The postage stamps: how few do you need for change?
   2. The edit distance problem: how few edits are necessary to change one string to another?
3. Lab this afternoon: simple gene finding.

Resources needed for this class:

• A basic genetics primer at NCBI.
• The handout on basic local alignment.
• The postage stamp problem spreadsheet
• The edit distance problem spreadsheet

Resources needed for Tuesday's lecture:

• The Blind Watchmaker.
• The Blind Watchmaker applet.

These items require Acrobat Reader.
These items require real player or windows media player
These items are Java applets, and require Java to be installed on your machine.