Alice and Bob want to go on holiday. Each of them has planned a route, which is a list of cities to be visited in a given order. A route may contain a city more than once.
As they want to travel together, they have to agree on a common route. None wants to change the order of the cities on his or her route or add other cities. Therefore they have no choice but to remove some cities from the route. Of course the common route should be as long as possible.
There are exactly 26 cities in the region. Therefore they are encoded on the lists as lower case letters from 'a' to 'z'.