word-ladder

题目描述

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 length5.
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

思路是我们需要构造出一条路径，在这条路径上从start到end，每次只能变动当前节点的一个字母，构造出一个新单词，看这个单词是否在字典中，并且把这个新单词加入到当前的邻居中，也就是加一条边。利用BFS，由于BFS是一层一层的搜索。所以得出来的路径长度当然也是最短的。设单词长度为k，每个字母替换26次，BFS的复杂度为O(n)，则总的复杂度为（26*k*n）。

java代码

import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.HashSet;
import java.util.LinkedList;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.Queue;

public class Solution2 {
    public int ladderLength(String start, String end, HashSet<String> dict) {
        Queue<String> q = new LinkedList<String>();
        Map<String, Boolean> visited = new HashMap<String, Boolean>();
        q.add(start);
        int length = 1;
        visited.put(start, true);
        int count1 = 1;//记录每一层的节点数
        int count2 = 0;
        while (!q.isEmpty()) {
            length++;
            for (int i = 0; i < count1; i++) {
                String current = q.poll();
                for (int j = 0; j < current.length(); j++) {
                    //替换每个单词的字母，看能否在dict中找到
                    char[] strCharArr = current.toCharArray();
                    for (char ch = 'a'; ch <= 'z'; ch++) {
                        if (strCharArr[j] == ch) {
                            continue;
                        }
                        strCharArr[j] = ch;
                        String newWord = new String(strCharArr);
                        if (dict.contains(newWord) && newWord.equals(end) != true && !visited.containsKey(newWord)) {
                            visited.put(newWord, true);
                            q.add(newWord);
                            count2++;
                        }
                        if (newWord.equals(end))
                            return length;
                    }
                }
            }
            count1 = count2;
            count2 = 0;
        }
        return 0;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String start = "hit";
        String end = "cog";
        HashSet<String> dict = new HashSet<String>();
        dict.add("hot");
        dict.add("dot");
        dict.add("dog");
        dict.add("lot");
        dict.add("log");
        System.out.println(new Solution2().ladderLength(start, end, dict));
    }
}