127. 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:

Only one letter can be changed at a time
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.

Note:
Return 0 if there is no such transformation sequence.
All words have the same length.
All words contain only lowercase alphabetic characters.

开始我的想法是用回溯法列出所有可能，再从里面挑选出路径最小的，这样做穷举的数量太大，最后time limited
错误代码示范：

class Solution {
public:
    int ladderLength(string beginWord, string endWord, unordered_set<string>& wordList) 
    {
        vector<string>temp;
        vector<int>count;
        temp.push_back(beginWord);
        helper(endWord,wordList,temp,count);
        if(count.size()==0)
            return 0;
        int min=count[0];
        for(int i=0;i<count.size();i++)
            if(count[i]<min)
                min=count[i];
        return min;
    }
    void helper(string endWord, unordered_set<string>& wordList,vector<string>&temp,vector<int> &count)
    {
        if(check(endWord,temp[temp.size()-1]))
        {
            count.push_back(temp.size()+1);
            //for(int i=0;i<temp.size();i++)
           //    cout<<temp[i]<<' ';
          // cout<<endl<<endl;
        }
        for(auto it=wordList.begin();it!=wordList.end();it++)
        {
            if(find(temp.begin(),temp.end(),*it)!=temp.end())
                continue;
            if(check(*it,temp[temp.size()-1]))
            {
                temp.push_back(*it);
                helper(endWord,wordList,temp,count);
                temp.pop_back();
            }
        }
    }
    bool check(string a,string b)
    {
        int count=0;
        for(int i=0;i<a.size();i++)
        {
            if(a[i]!=b[i])
                count++;
        }
        if(count==1)
            return true;
        return false;
    }
};

我从网上看到了一篇帖子，分析的很好，用的方法是求路径的BFS

http://blog.csdn.net/zxzxy1988/article/details/8591890

代码如下：

class Solution {
public:
    int ladderLength(string beginWord, string endWord, unordered_set<string>& wordList) 
    {
        int n=beginWord.size();
        if(0==n)
            return 0;
        int distance=1;
        queue<string>quetopush;
        queue<string>quetopop;
        quetopop.push(beginWord);
        while(wordList.size()>0&&!quetopop.empty())
        {
            while(!quetopop.empty())
            {
                string str=quetopop.front();
                quetopop.pop();
                for(int i=0;i<str.size();i++)
                {
                    for(char j='a';j<='z';j++)
                    {
                        if(j==str[i])
                            continue;
                        char temp=str[i];
                        str[i]=j;
                        if(str==endWord)
                            return distance+1;
                        if(wordList.count(str))
                        {
                            quetopush.push(str);
                            wordList.erase(str);
                        }
                        str[i]=temp;
                    }
                }
            }
            distance++;
            swap(quetopush,quetopop);
        }
        return 0;
    }
};