This program allows you to find a word ladder between two given words using breadth-first search. A word ladder is a sequence of words formed by changing one letter at a time, where each intermediate word in the sequence is a valid word defined by a word bank.
This program uses a graph to represent a dictionary of words. Each word is represented as a node in the graph, and two nodes are connected by an edge if the words differ by exactly one letter. The breadth-first search algorithm is used to find the shortest path from the starting word to the ending word in this graph.
The program first checks if the words are of the same character length. It then reads in the file containing a list of words for that character length. Next, it constructs a graph of nodes representing these words, and finds the shortest path from the starting word to the ending word, using the breadth-first seach algorithm.
This program has some limitations:
- Both input words must have the same character length.
- It only works for words contained in the word bank.
- A word bank exists for each character length between 3 and 9, inclusively.
- A default word bank exists for character lengths, outside of the above range.
- It only finds the shortest path between two words, if there is one.
