EDIT: I seem to have misunderstood the problem. Apparently the characters of the subsequence don't actually have to be adjacent, just in the same order for all strings? This is going to take somewhat more thought. Ignore my code below that doesn't solve the problem.

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This is not exactly a new problem, and it's relatively easy to solve, at least for two strings. Just sort all the character positions for each string in alphabetical order, then walk through them linearly.

use strict;
use warnings;

my ($s1, $s2);

for (1..10000) {
    $s1 .= ('A'..'Z')[rand 26];
}
for (1..10000) {
    $s2 .= ('A'..'Z')[rand 26];
}

print longest($s1, $s2);

sub longest {
    my ($s1, $s2) = @_;

    my (@s1, @s2, $p1, $p2, $c, $r, $max);

    @s1 = sortpos($s1);
    @s2 = sortpos($s2);

    $p1 = 0; $p2 = 0; $max = 0;
    while ($p1 <= $#s1 && $p2 <= $#s2) {
        $c = match($s1, $s1[$p1], $s2, $s2[$p2]);
        if ($c > $max) {
            $r = substr($s1, $s1[$p1], $c);
            $max = $c;
        }
        if ((substr($s1, $s1[$p1]) cmp substr($s2, $s2[$p2])) == -1) {
            $p1++;
        }
        else {
            $p2++;
        }
    }
    return $r;
}

sub match {
    my $p1 = $_[1]; my $p2 = $_[3];
    my $max = length($_[0]) - $p1 < length($_[2]) - $p2 ?
        (length($_[0]) - $p1 - 1) : (length($_[2]) - $p2 - 1);
    my $c = 0;

    for (0..$max) {
        last if substr($_[0], ($p1 + $_), 1) ne substr($_[2], ($p2 + $
+_), 1);
        $c++;
    }
    return $c;
}

sub sortpos {
    my $s = $_[0];
    return sort { substr($s, $a) cmp substr($s, $b) } 0..(length($s)-1
+);
}
[download]

Problem is, the code for sorting the positions uses substr, which means it's copying large sections of the strings on each compare (for a complexity of n lg^2 n instead of n lg n?). Perhaps someone can rewrite the code to use character positions, but for now, this should do for proof of concept.

It's easier to make this sort of thing efficient in C or C++.

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