  The normalized edit distance is one of the distances derived from the edit
distance. It is useful in some applications because it takes into account the
lengths of the two strings compared. The normalized edit distance is not
defined in terms of edit operations but rather in terms of the edit path. In
this paper we propose a new derivative of the edit distance that also takes
into consideration the lengths of the two strings, but the new distance is
related directly to the edit distance. The particularity of the new distance is
that it uses the genetic algorithms to set the values of the parameters it
uses. We conduct experiments to test the new distance and we obtain promising
results.
