Unshuffling a square is NP-hard

A shuffle of two strings is formed by interleaving the characters into a new string, keeping the characters of each string in order. A string is a square if it is a shuffle of two identical strings. There is a known polynomial time dynamic programming algorithm to determine if a given string z is the shuffle of two given strings x, y; however, it has been an open question whether there is a polynomial time algorithm to determine if a given …