Word Ladder

Given two words (beginWord and endWord), and a dictionary, find the length of shortest transformation sequence from beginWord to endWord, such that:

1. Only one letter can be changed at a time
2. Each intermediate word must exist in the dictionary

For example,

Given:
start = "hit"
end = "cog"
dict = ["hot","dot","dog","lot","log"]

As one shortest transformation is "hit" -> "hot" -> "dot" -> "dog" -> "cog",
return its length 5.

Note:

• Return 0 if there is no such transformation sequence.
• All words have the same length.
• All words contain only lowercase alphabetic characters.

题意很容易看懂，所用的方法是广度优先搜索（BFS）算法。

int diffCount(const string& s1, const string& s2)
{
	int count = 0, len = s1.length();
	for (int i = 0; i < len; i++)
	{
		if (s1[i] != s2[i])
			count++;
	}
	return count;
}
int ladderLength(string beginWord, string endWord, unordered_set<string>& wordDict)
{
	if (wordDict.size() == 0)
		return 0;

	queue<string> q;
	q.push(beginWord);
	unordered_map<string, int> visitLevel;//访问层次，每个字符串对应各自的最短访问长度
	visitLevel[beginWord] = 1;

	while (!q.empty())
	{
		string word = q.front(); q.pop();
		for (unordered_set<string>::iterator it = wordDict.begin(); it != wordDict.end(); )
		{
			string ladderWord = *it;
			if (diffCount(word, ladderWord) == 1)	//word是否可以通过一次变更就达到下一个词典里有的某个单词
			{
				visitLevel[ladderWord] = visitLevel[word] + 1;//step+1
				if (*it == endWord)
					return visitLevel[ladderWord];
				
				q.push(ladderWord);		//加入队列
				it = wordDict.erase(it);//从词典中删除访问过的单词
			}
		}
	}

	return 0;
}