Edit Distance

Category

DP - Multidimensional

Checkbox

Difficulty

Medium

Index

Key Ideas

The key idea to solve this problem is to use dynamic programming and calculate the minimum edit distance between two strings by considering three possible operations: insertion, deletion, and substitution.

Problem Number

Problem Summary

The Edit Distance problem, listed as problem number 72 in the LeetCode-75 curated list, is a medium difficulty dynamic programming problem that involves finding the minimum number of operations required to transform one string into another. The key pitfalls in solving this problem include correctly handling the base cases, determining the optimal subproblem structure, and efficiently implementing the dynamic programming approach.

Solution Summary

The best solution for solving the Edit Distance problem is to use dynamic programming. We can create a two-dimensional array to represent a matrix, where the rows represent the characters of one string and the columns represent the characters of the other string. By iterating through the matrix, we can calculate the minimum number of operations required to transform one string into the other. The operations include insertion, deletion, and substitution. By storing the minimum values in the matrix, we can efficiently compute the edit distance. The time complexity of this solution is O(m*n), where m and n are the lengths of the input strings.