How should I practice Determine the Edit Distance in a Word Ladder?

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Determine the Edit Distance in a Word Ladder

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Problem statement

Given two words (beginWord and endWord), and a dictionary's word list, find the minimum number of operations needed to change beginWord into endWord.

You can change only one letter at a time, and each intermediate word must exist in the word list. If there is no possible transformation, return None (Python), -1 (Java & C++), null (Javascript).

Function

ladderLength(beginWord: String, endWord: String, wordList: List<String>) → int

Examples

Example 1

beginWord = "hit"endWord = "cog"wordList = ["hit", "hot", "dot", "dog", "cog"]return = 4

The transformation sequence can be: hit -> hot -> dot -> dog -> cog, which is 4 steps long.

Example 2

beginWord = "word"endWord = "word"wordList = ["word", "ward"]return = 0

Since the beginWord is the same as the endWord, no transformation is needed, so the number of steps is 0.

Example 3

beginWord = "hit"endWord = "cog"wordList = ["hit", "hot", "dot", "dog"]return = -1

The word cog is not in the list, so there is no possible transformation sequence.