Given two words (start and end), and a dictionary, find all shortest transformation sequence(s) 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"] Return [ ["hit","hot","dot","dog","cog"], ["hit","hot","lot","log","cog"] ] Note: All words have the same length. All words contain only lowercase alphabetic characters.
public class Solution { public List<List<String>> findLadders(String start, String end, Set<String> dict) { List<List<String>> ladders = new ArrayList<List<String>>(); Map<String, List<String>> map = new HashMap<String, List<String>>(); Map<String, Integer> distance = new HashMap<String, Integer>(); dict.add(start); dict.add(end); bfs(map, distance, start, end, dict); List<String> path = new ArrayList<String>(); dfs(ladders, path, end, start, distance, map); return ladders; } void dfs(List<List<String>> ladders, List<String> path, String crt, String start, Map<String, Integer> distance, Map<String, List<String>> map) { path.add(crt); if (crt.equals(start)) { Collections.reverse(path); ladders.add(new ArrayList<String>(path)); Collections.reverse(path); } else { for (String next : map.get(crt)) { if (distance.containsKey(next) && distance.get(crt) == distance.get(next) + 1) { dfs(ladders, path, next, start, distance, map); } } } path.remove(path.size() - 1); } void bfs(Map<String, List<String>> map, Map<String, Integer> distance, String start, String end, Set<String> dict) { Queue<String> q = new LinkedList<String>(); q.offer(start); distance.put(start, 0); for (String s : dict) { map.put(s, new ArrayList<String>()); } while (!q.isEmpty()) { String crt = q.poll(); List<String> nextList = expand(crt, dict); for (String next : nextList) { map.get(next).add(crt); if (!distance.containsKey(next)) { distance.put(next, distance.get(crt) + 1); q.offer(next); } } } } List<String> expand(String crt, Set<String> dict) { List<String> expansion = new ArrayList<String>(); for (int i = 0; i < crt.length(); i++) { for (char ch = 'a'; ch <= 'z'; ch++) { if (ch != crt.charAt(i)) { String expanded = crt.substring(0, i) + ch + crt.substring(i + 1); if (dict.contains(expanded)) { expansion.add(expanded); } } } } return expansion; } }