Leetcode 2746. Decremental String Concatenation

Given a sequence of strings, you must process them in order and for each string choose to append or prepend it to the current result, where concatenation removes one of two adjacent characters only when the joining characters are equal; compute the minimum possible final length. The problem reduces to a dynamic programming/decision sequence problem (n ≤ 1000, alphabet size 26) tracking how local choices affect length via character matches.