It is a curious fact that consumers buying a new software product generally do not expect the software to be bug-free. Can you imagine buying a car whose steering wheel only turns to the right? Or a CD-player that plays only CDs with country music on them? Probably not. But for software systems it seems to be acceptable if they do not perform as they should do. In fact, many software companies have adopted the habit of sending out patches to fix bugs every few weeks after a new product is released (and even charging money for the patches).
Tinyware Inc. is one of those companies. After releasing a new word processing software this summer, they have been producing patches ever since. Only this weekend they have realized a big problem with the patches they released. While all patches fix some bugs, they often rely on other bugs to be present to be installed. This happens because to fix one bug, the patches exploit the special behavior of the program due to another bug.
Tinyware's problem is a simple one. Given the original version of their software, which contains all the bugs in B, it is possible to apply a sequence of patches to the software which results in a bugfree version of the software? And if so, assuming that every patch takes a certain time to apply, how long does the fastest sequence take?