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Edit Distance (Levenshtein) is a hard coding interview question covering dynamic programming, strings — the kind asked at FAANG (Facebook/Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and AI-first companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia.
Given two strings word1 and word2, return the minimum number of operations (insert, delete, replace) required to transform word1 into word2.
Example: word1="horse", word2="ros" -> 3 Example: word1="intention", word2="execution" -> 5
Used in spell checkers, DNA sequence alignment, fuzzy search, and git diff.
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A full interview loop is more than one round. These are the others, each with what is on the site for it.