Lior Pachter Ties OpenAI Paper Critique to 2015 Edit Distance Lower Bound Debate
lpachter · x · 2026-10-08
Computational biologist Lior Pachter connects his ongoing critique of the OpenAI paper corpus to the 2015 (conditional) edit distance lower bound of Backurs and Indyk, linking his old blog post 'In biology n does not go to infinity.'
That 2015 piece pushed back on a Boston Globe column celebrating the Backurs-Indyk STOC result: unless SETH is false, edit distance cannot be computed in strongly subquadratic time. Pachter's point was the gap between worst-case asymptotic complexity results and the sequence comparisons biologists actually perform — sequence lengths in biology don't go to infinity, so such lower bounds say little about practical Needleman-Wunsch use.
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