The Global Alignment problemseeks similarities between two entire strings.
This is useful when the similarity between the strings extends over their entire
length, for example, in protein sequences from the same protein family.
These protein sequences are often very conserved and have almost the same
length in organisms ranging from fruit flies to humans. However, in many
biological applications, the score of an alignment between two substrings of
v and w might actually be larger than the score of an alignment between the
entireties of v and w.