Researcher Tests OpenAI Paper's 2-Approximation: 4.29M Vertices Needed for Just 1,000 Reads
lpachter · x · 2026-10-08
Computational biologist Lior Pachter tested a 2-approximation for shortest common superstring from a paper in OpenAI's corpus — a problem relevant to read compression in sequencing. He found the construction as written requires 4.29 million candidate vertices for just 1,000 reads, making the algorithm impractical at sequencing scale. Part of an ongoing series examining the real-world usability of published OpenAI papers.
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