Dynamic Longest Common Substring in Polylogarithmic Time

Abstract

The longest common substring problem consists in finding a longest string that appears as a (contiguous) substring of two input strings. We consider the dynamic variant of this problem, in which we are to maintain two dynamic strings S and T , each of length at most n, that undergo substitutions of letters, in order to be able to return a longest common substring after each substitution. Recently, Amir et al. [ESA 2019] presented a solution for this problem that needs only Õ(n 2/3 ) time per update. This brought the challenge of determining whether there exists a faster solution with polylogarithmic update time, or (as is the case for other dynamic problems), we should expect a polynomial (conditional) lower bound. We answer this question by designing a significantly faster algorithm that processes each substitution in amortized log O(1) n time with high probability. Our solution relies on exploiting the local consistency of the parsing of a collection of dynamic strings due to Gawrychowski et al. [SODA 2018], and on maintaining two dynamic trees with labeled bicolored leaves, so that after each update we can report a pair of nodes, one from each tree, of maximum combined weight, which have at least one common leaf-descendant of each color. We complement this with a lower bound of Ω(log n/ log log n) for the update time of any polynomial-size data structure that maintains the LCS of two dynamic strings, and the same lower bound for the update time of any data structure of size Õ(n) that maintains the LCS of a static and a dynamic string. Both lower bounds hold even allowing amortization and randomization.