word-ladder

Given two words (start and end), and a dictionary, find the length of shortest transformation sequence from start to end, such that:
Only one letter can be changed at a time
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 length5.
Note:
Return 0 if there is no such transformation sequence.
All words have the same length.
All words contain only lowercase alphabetic characters.

可以利用广度优先搜索寻找最短的路径,需要注意的是如果可以修改字典,那么就不需要另外的数组来存储是否访问过了.另外可以用last和nlast的方法记录层数

class Solution {
public:
int ladderLength(string start, string end, unordered_set<string> &dict) {
    if (start == end)
        return 0;
    int count = 2;
    queue<string> que;
    que.push(start);
    string last = start;
    string nlast = start;
    while (!que.empty())
    {
        string temp = que.front();
        que.pop();
        for (int i = 0; i<temp.size(); ++i)
        {
            char a = temp[i];
            for (int k = 0; k<26; ++k)
            {
                temp[i] = k + 'a';
                if (temp == end)
                    return count;
                if (dict.find(temp) != dict.end())
                {
                    que.push(temp);
                    nlast = temp;
                    dict.erase(temp);
                }
            }
            temp[i] = a;    //恢复temp
        }
        if (temp == last)  //一层遍历完毕
        {
            ++count;
            last = nlast;
        }
    }
    return 0;
}
};