【Leetcode】Word Ladder

题目链接：https://leetcode.com/problems/word-ladder/

题目：

Given two words (beginWord and endWord), and a dictionary's word list, find the length of shortest transformation sequence from beginWordto 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.

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：

BFS，每次遍历直走一步，对每一位遍历可得当前word一步可达的下一个在dict中的word，图论知识可知，若图中结点之间距离相等，则最短路径就是BFS第一个到达目的结点的路径。  这也很好理解，因为是BFS，每一次遍历都往前走一步，第一个到达目的地的，一定是最短的。

算法：

	class Word {
		int steps;
		String word;

		public Word(String word, int steps) {
			this.word = word;
			this.steps = steps;
		}
	}

	public int ladderLength(String beginWord, String endWord, Set<String> wordList) {
		Queue<Word> queue = new LinkedList<Word>();
		queue.offer(new Word(beginWord, 1));
		wordList.add(endWord);

		while (!queue.isEmpty()) {
			Word w = queue.poll();
			if (w.word.equals(endWord)) {
				return w.steps;
			}
			for (int i = 0; i < w.word.length(); i++) {
				char[] ws = w.word.toCharArray();
				for (char j = 'a'; j < 'z'; j++) {
					ws[i] = j;
					String ns = new String(ws);
					if (wordList.contains(ns)) {
						queue.offer(new Word(ns, w.steps + 1));
						wordList.remove(ns);
					}
				}
			}
		}
		return 0;
	}