[LeetCode] Word Ladder

原题地址：https://oj.leetcode.com/problems/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 length 5.

思路：刚看到题，有dict，感觉像是动态规划，但没有发现最优子结构。转换成图问题，点为同样长度的所有小写字符串，只相差一个字符的字符串之间有连线，利用图的BFS，期间需要通过点是否在Dict中进行剪枝，第一次得到end字符串的即为最浅的变换过程，也就是最短的变换序列。时间复杂度为（26^len * dict.size()）；

public class Solution {
    public int ladderLength(String start, String end, Set<String> dict) {
        if (start == null || start.length() < 1 || end == null || end.length() < 1)  {
            return 0;
        }
        
        Queue<String> queue = new LinkedList<String>();
        Set<String> visited = new HashSet<String>();
        queue.offer(start);
        visited.add(start);
        int lastNum = 1;
        int curNum = 0;
        int level = 1;
        while (!queue.isEmpty()) {
            String currStr = queue.poll();
            char[] charArr = currStr.toCharArray();
            
            lastNum--;
            for (int i = 0; i < charArr.length; i++) {
                char temp = charArr[i];
                for (char ch = 'a'; ch <= 'z'; ch++) {
                    charArr[i] = ch;
                    String newStr = new String(charArr);
                    
                    if (newStr.equals(end)) {
                        return level + 1;
                    }
                    
                    if (dict.contains(newStr) && !visited.contains(newStr)) {
                        visited.add(newStr);
                        queue.offer(newStr);
                        curNum++;
                    }
                }
                
                charArr[i] = temp;
            }
            
            if (lastNum == 0) {
                level++;
                lastNum = curNum;
                curNum = 0;
            }
        }
        
        return 0;
    }
}