I cobbled together an edit distance algorithm back in 2006 which worked quite well and was considering publishing. I haven't yet and it's a good thing. I recently found in Dan Gusfield's Algorithms on Strings, Trees and Sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology a very similar algorithm. Burden of proof that it is different is on me.
While comparing the algorithms, I noticed taking a slightly different view of the data I could add a third, fourth and perhaps N number of strings and produce a meaningful comparison string. Certainly a completely different sequence and haven't found anything like it yet. Still have a few things to work out but it looks very promising. Promising in that there would seem to be many applications.
