Question

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 transformed word must exist in the word list. Note that beginWord is not a transformed word.
For example,
Given:
beginWord = "hit"
endWord = "cog"
wordList = ["hot","dot","dog","lot","log","cog"]
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.
You may assume no duplicates in the word list.
You may assume beginWord and endWord are non-empty and are not the same.

Answer 1

The shortest transformation sequence from 'hit' to 'cog' with the given word list is 5 steps long. The task involves computer algorithms to find the sequence by changing one letter at a time with each intermediate word existing in the word list.

Step-by-step explanation:

The task of finding the length of the shortest transformation sequence from one word to another, changing only one letter at a time, falls under the category of computer algorithms and data structures, a typical problem in coding challenges. In the given example, the sequence from beginWord 'hit' to endWord 'cog' with a wordList available is as follows: 'hit' -> 'hot' -> 'dot' -> 'dog' -> 'cog'. This shows a transformation sequence with each step being a valid word from the word list. The length of this particular sequence is 5 because there are 5 words in the sequence, including the beginWord and the endWord.

When you perform similar transformations, if no valid sequence can be found that satisfies the conditions (only one letter can be changed at a time and each transformed word must exist in the word list), then the length of the sequence would be 0, indicating that no transformation is possible.