Shortest path to transform one word into another

Question

For a Data Structures project, I must find the shortest path between two words (like \"cat\" and \"dog\"), changing only one letter at a time. We a

Answer 1

My gut feeling is that your friend is correct, in that there isn't a more efficient solution, but that is assumming you are reloading the dictionary every time. If you were to keep a running database of common transitions, then surely there would be a more efficient method for finding a solution, but you would need to generate the transitions beforehand, and discovering which transitions would be useful (since you can't generate them all!) is probably an art of its own.