in reply to [OT] The interesting problem of comparing bit-strings.

My first thought was that the problem is similar to what you might do in bioinformatics, as mentioned by Anonymous earlier. Although there are are likely significant differences between bitstrings and character strings that I can't help you with, I was listening to Natural Language Processing lectures on Coursera and the Edit Distance lectures attacked the problem with Dynamic Programming. Maybe that helps you with the coding strategy?

Sometimes I can think of 6 impossible LDAP attributes before breakfast.
  • Comment on Re: [OT] The interesting problem of comparing bit-strings.

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Re^2: [OT] The interesting problem of comparing bit-strings.
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Mar 25, 2015 at 12:02 UTC

    Bioinformatics is one use (actually many uses) of large bitstring searches.

    Others include:

    1. Finding patterns of usage in temporal data.

      Each bit represents a time period; 1s represent activity within that time period.

    2. Steganography.

      Both application of, and detection of.

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