DNA sequence

The twenty-first century is a biology-technology developing century. We know that a gene is made of DNA. The nucleotide bases from which DNA is built are A(adenine), C(cytosine), G(guanine), and T(thymine). Finding the longest common subsequence between DNA/Protein sequences is one of the basic problems in modern computational molecular biology. But this problem is a little different. Given several DNA sequences, you are asked to make a shortest sequence from them so that each of the given sequence is the subsequence of it.

For example, given "ACGT","ATGC","CGTT" and "CAGT", you can make a sequence in the following way. It is the shortest but may be not the only one.

The first line is the test case number t. Then t test cases follow. In each case, the first line is an integer n ( 1<=n<=8 ) represents number of the DNA sequences. The following k lines contain the k sequences, one per line. Assuming that the length of any sequence is between 1 and 5.

For each test case, print a line containing the length of the shortest sequence that can be made from these sequences.

1
4
ACGT
ATGC
CGTT
CAGT

8

LL

HDU 2006-12 Programming Contest