The goal of this 2013 precision medicine challenge, conducted with Harvard Medical School on Topcoder, was to find a faster, more accurate solution to calculate the edit distance between a query DNA string and the original DNA string. Prior to the contest, the best-known solution, MegaBLAST, processed 100,000 sequences to a high degree of accuracy, yet required 2,000 seconds to execute. A Harvard researcher spent a year trying to speed up the algorithm and reduced the computational time to 400 seconds (Lakhani et al., 2013). Seven hundred and thirty-three competitors registered for the contest and 122 competitors submitted solutions competing for $6,000 in prizes. The winning solution was hundreds of times faster and more accurate than MegaBLAST, and reduced execution time to just over 16 seconds. For more information see here.