Efficiently build a graph of words with given Hamming distance

Question

I want to build a graph from a list of words with Hamming distance of (say) 1, or to put it differently, two words are connected if they only differ from one letter (lo

Answer 1

Here is linear O(N) algorithm, but with big constant factor (R * L * 2). R is radix (for latin alphabet it is 26). L is a medium length of word. 2 is a factor of adding/replacing wildcard character. So abc and aac and abca are two ops wich leads to hamming distance of 1.

It is written in Ruby. And for 240k words it takes ~250Mb RAM and 136 seconds on average hardware

Blueprint of graph implementation

class Node
  attr_reader :val, :edges

  def initialize(val)
    @val = val
    @edges = {}
  end

  def <<(node)
    @edges[node.val] ||= true
  end

  def connected?(node)
    @edges[node.val]
  end

  def inspect
    "Val: #{@val}, edges: #{@edges.keys * ', '}"
  end
end

class Graph
  attr_reader :vertices
  def initialize
    @vertices = {}
  end

  def <<(val)
    @vertices[val] = Node.new(val)
  end

  def connect(node1, node2)
    # print "connecting #{size} #{node1.val}, #{node2.val}\r"
    node1 << node2
    node2 << node1
  end

  def each
    @vertices.each do |val, node|
      yield [val, node]
    end
  end

  def get(val)
    @vertices[val]
  end
end

The algorithm itself

CHARACTERS = ('a'..'z').to_a
graph = Graph.new

# ~ 240 000 words
File.read("/usr/share/dict/words").each_line.each do |word|
  word = word.chomp
  graph << word.downcase
end

graph.each do |val, node|
  CHARACTERS.each do |char|
    i = 0
    while i <= val.size
      node2 = graph.get(val[0, i] + char + val[i..-1])
      graph.connect(node, node2) if node2
      if i < val.size
        node2 = graph.get(val[0, i] + char + val[i+1..-1])
        graph.connect(node, node2) if node2
      end
      i += 1
    end
  end
end