Designing short DNA words is a problem of constructing a set (i.e., code) of
n DNA strings (i.e., words) with the minimum length such that the Hamming
distance between each pair of words is at least k and the n words satisfy a set
of additional constraints. This problem has applications in, e.g., DNA
self-assembly and DNA arrays. Previous works include those that extended
results from coding theory to obtain bounds on code and word sizes for
biologically motivated constraints and those that applied heuristic local
searches, genetic algorithms, and randomized algorithms.