A wild basilisk just appeared at your doorstep. You are not entirely sure what a basilisk is and you wonder whether it evolved from your favorite animal, the weasel.
How can you find out whether basilisks evolved from weasels? Certainly, a good first step is to sequence both of their DNAs. Then you can try to check whether there is a sequence of possible mutations from the DNA of the weasel to the DNA of the basilisk.
Your friend Ron is a talented alchemist and has studied DNA sequences in many of his experiments. He has found out that DNA strings consist of the letters A, B and C and that single mutations can only remove or add substrings at any position in the string (a substring is a contiguous sequence of characters). The substrings that can be removed or added by a mutation are AA, BB, CC, ABAB or BCBC. During a sequence of mutations a DNA string may even become empty.
Ron has agreed to sequence the DNA of the weasel and the basilisk for you, but finding out whether there is a sequence of possible mutations that leads from one to the other is too difficult for him, so you have to do it on your own.