For a given k value in (3), each Q can be represented in terms of the other three variables. Since the length of the motif is l, the final objective function (i.e. the information content score) would contain 3l independent variables. It should be noted that even if there are 4l variables in total, the parameter space will contain only 3l independent variables because of the constraints obtained from (3). Thus, the constraints help in reducing the dimensionality of the search problem.