Word Ladder

题目

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.

方法

使用BFS进行遍历，但是当数据量很大的时候超时。使用的技巧：将string中的每一个char从a到z进行替换，判断替换后的是否在dict中。

    private boolean oneLetter(String str1, String str2) {
        int count = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i <str1.length(); i++) {
            if (str1.charAt(i) != str2.charAt(i)) {
                count++;
            }
        }
        return count == 1;
    }
    public int ladderLength(String start, String end, Set<String> dict) {
    	if (start == null || start == null || start.length() != end.length()) {
    		return 0;
    	}
    	if (start.equals(end)) {
    		return 1;
    	}
        if (oneLetter(start, end)) {
            return 2;
        }
        Map<String, Integer> hasFind = new HashMap<String, Integer>();
        Queue<String> queue = new LinkedList<String>();    
        queue.offer(start);
        hasFind.put(start, 1);
        
        while (!queue.isEmpty()) {
        	String str = queue.poll();
        	int count = hasFind.get(str);
        	for (int i = 0; i < str.length(); i++) {
        		for (char k = 'a'; k < 'z'; k++) {
        			if (str.charAt(i) != k) {
        				StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(str);
        				builder.setCharAt(i, k);
        				String temp = builder.toString();
        				if (temp.equals(end)) {
        					return count + 1;
        				}
        				if (dict.contains(temp) && !hasFind.containsKey(temp)) {
        					queue.offer(temp);
        					hasFind.put(temp, count + 1);
        				}
        			}
        		}
        	}
        }
        return 0;
    }