The "Levenshtein" game 1

[tgreer]

The "Levenshtein Difference" measures the difference in two strings, that is to say, how many characters must be changed to make two strings equal. I'm using "strings" in the technical sense.

I thought it an appropriate name of a game wherein you change one letter of a word at a time to transform it into another word. Whoever can make the transformation in the least steps, wins. It's easiest with 4-letter words. In homage to another thread, I give you WORD to MEAN in 5 steps:

CTRL-A to see answer.
[COLOR=white]
WORD
WORE
MORE
MORN
MOAN
MEAN
[/color]

Can you do better?

Thomas D. Greer

Providing PostScript & PDF
Training, Development & Consulting

 

[gmmastros]

A star to tgreer for starting this thread. I've never heard of "Levenshtein distance" before this thread. I googled it and learned a lot. I even found a sql server UDF to calculate the Levenshtein distance. I then incorporated it in to a search function used it to match names from 2 seperate tables.

-George

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause. - Fortune cookie wisdom