How should I practice Word Ladder?

Start by reading the full statement, solve the visible examples, then compare the pattern against related Goldman Sachs phone screen and onsite interview problems in FastPrep.

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Problem · String

Word Ladder

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● Hard

Goldman SachsFULLTIMEPHONE SCREENONSITE INTERVIEW

Problem statement

Given beginWord, endWord, and a dictionary wordList, return the number of words in the shortest transformation sequence from beginWord to endWord.

Every transformation changes exactly one letter, and every transformed word, including endWord, must be in the dictionary. Return 0 when no sequence exists.

Function

ladderLength(beginWord: String, endWord: String, wordList: String[]) → int

Examples

Example 1

beginWord = "hit"endWord = "cog"wordList = ["hot","dot","dog","lot","log","cog"]return = 5

A shortest sequence is hit -> hot -> dot -> dog -> cog.

Example 2

beginWord = "hit"endWord = "cog"wordList = ["hot","dot","dog","lot","log"]return = 0