LeetCode——Word Ladder

Given two words (start and end), and a dictionary, find the length of shortest transformation sequence from start to end, 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.

» Solve this problem

题目可以转换为最短路问题。

但是不能用最基本的最短路算法求解，会TLE。

需要进行一定的改变，选取了最小的节点之后，不是依次浏览更新所有节点，而是直接对该节点进行字母变换。

class Solution {
public:
    int ladderLength(string start, string end, unordered_set<string> &dict) {
        // Start typing your C/C++ solution below
        // DO NOT write int main() function
        queue<string> cur;
        set<string> set;
        cur.push(start);
        set.insert(start);
        for (int dis = 1; cur.size() > 0; dis++) {
            int count = cur.size();
            for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) {
                string q = cur.front();
                for (int j = 0; j < q.size(); j++) {
                    string temp = q;
                    for (char k = 'a'; k <= 'z'; k++) {
                        if (k != temp[j]) {
                            temp[j] = k;
                            if (temp == end) {
                                return dis + 1;
                            }
                            if (dict.find(temp) != dict.end() && set.find(temp) == set.end()) {
                                set.insert(temp);
                                cur.push(temp);
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
                cur.pop();
            }
        }
        return 0;
    }
};