Upper bounds on the average edit distance between two random strings

Abstract

We study the average edit distance between two random strings. More precisely, we adapt a technique introduced by Lueker in the context of the average longest common subsequence of two random strings to improve the known upper bound on the average edit distance. We improve all the known upper bounds for small alphabets. We also provide a new implementation of Lueker technique to improve the lower bound on the average length of the longest common subsequence of two random strings for all small alphabets of size other than $2$ and $4$.