- Difficulty: Hard
- Tags: LeetCode, Hard, Breadth-First Search, Hash Table, String, leetcode-127, O(b^(d/2)), O(w * l), Medium, CTCI, Bi-BFS, LintCode, O(n * d), O(d), BFS
Problem
A transformation sequence from word beginWord
to word endWord
using a dictionary wordList
is a sequence of words beginWord -> s1 -> s2 -> ... -> sk
such that:
- Every adjacent pair of words differs by a single letter.
- Every
si
for1 <= i <= k
is inwordList
. Note thatbeginWord
does not need to be inwordList
. sk == endWord
Given two words, beginWord
and endWord
, and a dictionary wordList
, return the number of words in the shortest transformation sequence from beginWord
to endWord
, or 0
if no such sequence exists.
Example 1:
Input: beginWord = "hit", endWord = "cog", wordList = ["hot","dot","dog","lot","log","cog"] Output: 5 Explanation: One shortest transformation sequence is "hit" -> "hot" -> "dot" -> "dog" -> cog", which is 5 words long.
Example 2:
Input: beginWord = "hit", endWord = "cog", wordList = ["hot","dot","dog","lot","log"] Output: 0 Explanation: The endWord "cog" is not in wordList, therefore there is no valid transformation sequence.
Constraints:
1 <= beginWord.length <= 10
endWord.length == beginWord.length
1 <= wordList.length <= 5000
wordList[i].length == beginWord.length
beginWord
,endWord
, andwordList[i]
consist of lowercase English letters.beginWord != endWord
- All the words in
wordList
are unique.