Word Ladder

Question:

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.

//********** Hints ************

LZ认为leetcode里面有带word题干的题目都好难，此题也是其中之一，但是思路比较简单，用BFS即可：

一个Queue作为Breadth,一个Hashset作为判断visited

//*****************************

Solution:

public class Solution {
   public int ladderLength(String start, String end, HashSet dict) {
       Set<String> visited = new HashSet<String>();
       Queue<String> breadth = new LinkedList<String>();
       
       breadth.offer(start);
       visited.add(start);
       
       int step = 1;
       int count = 1;
       
       while(count > 0){
           while(count > 0){
               char[] cur = breadth.poll().toCharArray();
           
               for(int i = 0; i < cur.length; i++){
                   char temp = cur[i];
                   for(char c = 'a'; c <= 'z'; c++){
                        if(c == temp)
                            continue;
                        cur[i] = c;
                        String s = new String(cur);
                        if(s.equals(end))
                            return (step + 1);
                        if(!visited.contains(s) && dict.contains(s)){
                            breadth.offer(s);
                            visited.add(s);
                        }
                   }
                   cur[i] = temp;
               }
               count --;
           }
           
           step ++;
           count = breadth.size();
       }
       
       return 0;
    }
}