A while back I wrote an introduction to the shortest superstring problem and promised two follow-ups: one showing the greedy algorithm I wrote in VBA, and another showing how I bolted optimization on top to do better than greedy alone. Then I did what I usually do with “future work” and let it sit. Here, finally, is that follow-up — the whole thing in one post, because this is really the story of how I solved the shortest superstring problem in Excel with two stages of the same machine: a VBA pass that generates candidates, and an optimization model that picks the best of them.
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