[bandrami]

My advisor in grad school had me implement a "typo distance" metric on strings once (how many single-key displacements for a typist using home row touch-typing to get from string A to string B), which seemed kind of cool. I never did find out what if anything she wanted to use it for.

[vintermann]

Probably for spell checking! If you encounter an unknown word, you can rank candidate replacements by your advisor's metric.