I was recently in a coding interview where I had heard of the original problem (a version of "transform one word to another one letter at a time, making sure that each step is a real word") so instead of just skipping the question, we went straight to the "extra credit" question of "can you tell that there is a path from one word to another faster than just calculating the answer?"
After hearing the word "memoization" go through my head (part of "Hacking the Coding Interview." which I recommend at least for the wealth of example questions for practice), I basically walked my way through making a disjoint-set data structure using the words as keys and the set number as values. I'm prettyy sure that making that up on the spot is what got me the job.
After hearing the word "memoization" go through my head (part of "Hacking the Coding Interview." which I recommend at least for the wealth of example questions for practice), I basically walked my way through making a disjoint-set data structure using the words as keys and the set number as values. I'm prettyy sure that making that up on the spot is what got me the job.