In my case I wasn't sure whether I wanted to do a PhD so I went for a Masters first. After finishing a Masters I didn't feel as though I did "real research". To an extent I feel research given to M.S students is not as interesting and will have to be much smaller in scope due to length of time a M.S student has. It seems to me the only way to really know whether you like research is to be in a PhD program doing research. Although this isn't a great answer because it requires investing a lot of time. Thats my experience at least.
What a coincidence! I have been looking at the edit distance problem, because it can be applied to computer vision. One of the uses is if you have a stereo image pair you can figure out the depth of the objects in the scene, by matching corresponding features. The edit distance problem helps with figuring out which pixels in one stereo image correspond to pixels in the other stereo image.
I am hoping with a bit more effort I can understand the dynamic programming side of it better.