Pachter: OpenAI Corpus Edit Distance Paper Is 'Totally Useless' for Biological Alignment
lpachter · x · 2026-10-08
Continuing his critique of the OpenAI paper corpus, Lior Pachter highlights an edit distance paper offering a randomized (1+epsilon) approximation with probability at least 2/3 under unit costs. He argues it neither generates an alignment nor is usable for biological sequence alignment due to the unit cost constraint. Combined with his earlier finding that a 2-approximation for shortest common superstring needs 4.29 million vertices for 1,000 reads, this is part 2 of a series testing the practical usability of published OpenAI papers.
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