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Shortest Transformation Sequence

Hard

Given two words, start and end, and a dictionary containing an array of words, return the length of the shortest transformation sequence to transform start to end. A transformation sequence is a series of words in which:

  • Each word differs from the preceding word by exactly one letter.
  • Each word in the sequence exists in the dictionary.

If no such transformation sequence exists, return 0.

Example:

Input: start = 'red', end = 'hit',
       dictionary = [
            'red', 'bed', 'hat', 'rod', 'rad', 'rat', 'hit', 'bad', 'bat'
       ]
Output: 5

Constraints:

  • All words are the same length.
  • All words contain only lowercase English letters.
  • The dictionary contains no duplicate words.

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