[leetcode] Word Ladder

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.

思路： 我开始的思路是利用bfs，查找距离为1的单词，存入queue中，接着进行遍历，直到与end距离位1，但是一直time limit exceed, 因为我必须得为每一条分支维护不同的set， 每个分支查找的范围不一样，这是比较tricky的地方，可以利用二维数组，或者hashmap, 但是占用空间大，维护耗时。后来我看了网上提供的代码，思路是对每个单词的每一个字符从a~z进行替换，如果遇到了end，直接return, 没有的话，判断dict里面是否有，有的话，则加入queue，并从dict中删除，这样其实每个单词只需要O(26*length)的时间，而且因为是通过hashcode搜索，速度是O(1), 相比之下，如果通过搜索距离为1的单词，需要遍历整个set，对于大数据集，非常耗时。

public class Solution {
    public int ladderLength(String start, String end, HashSet<String> dict) {
        if (dict == null || dict.size() == 0) {
            return 0;
        }

        Queue<String> queue = new LinkedList<String>();
        queue.offer(start);
        dict.remove(start);
        int length = 1;

        while(!queue.isEmpty()) {
            int count = queue.size();
            for (int i = 0; i<count; i++){
                String current = queue.poll();
                for (char c = 'a'; c <= 'z'; c++) {
                    for (int j=0; j < current.length(); j++) {
                        if (c == current.charAt(j)) {
                            continue;
                        }
                        String tmp = replace(current, j, c);
                        if (tmp.equals(end)) {
                            return length + 1;
                        }
                        if (dict.contains(tmp)){
                            queue.offer(tmp);
                            dict.remove(tmp);
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
            length++;
        }
        return 0;
    }

    private String replace(String s, int index, char c) {
        char[] chars = s.toCharArray();
        chars[index] = c;
        return new String(chars);
    }

}