Leetcode163: Word Ladder

Given two words (beginWord and endWord), and a dictionary's word list, find the length of shortest transformation sequence from beginWord to endWord, such that:

1. Only one letter can be changed at a time
2. Each intermediate word must exist in the word list

For example,

Given:
beginWord = "hit"
endWord = "cog"
wordList = ["hot","dot","dog","lot","log"]

As one shortest transformation is "hit" -> "hot" -> "dot" -> "dog" -> "cog",

return its length 5.

网上对该问题的解决无一例外都是按照下面的思路：将当前单词每一个字符替换成a~z的任意一个字符，然后判断是否在词典中出现。此时的复杂度是O(26*word_length)，当单词比较短时，这种方法的优势就体现出来了。

class Solution {
public:
    int ladderLength(string beginWord, string endWord, unordered_set<string>& wordList) {
        if(beginWord.size() != endWord.size()) return 0;  
        if(beginWord.empty() || endWord.empty())return 0;  
          
        queue<string> path;  
        path.push(beginWord);  
        int level = 1;  
        int count = 1;  
        wordList.erase(beginWord);  
        while(wordList.size() > 0 && !path.empty())  
        {  
            string curword = path.front();  
            path.pop();count--;  
            for(int i = 0; i < curword.size(); i++)  
            {  
                string tmp = curword;  
                for(char j='a'; j<='z'; j++)  
                {  
                    if(tmp[i]==j)continue;  
                    tmp[i] = j;  
                    if(tmp==endWord)return level+1;  
                    if(wordList.find(tmp) != wordList.end()) path.push(tmp);  
                    wordList.erase(tmp);  
                }  
            }  
            if(count==0)  
            {  
                count = path.size();  
                level++;  
            }  
        }  
        return 0;  
    }
};