Code RoomEdit distance
MediumPrep Room Coding #682

Edit distance

CodingAlgorithms & data structuresMid–Senior~25 min

Return the Levenshtein edit distance between two strings a and b: the minimum number of single-character insertions, deletions, or substitutions needed to turn a into b. For example, turning "kitten" into "sitting" takes 3 edits. Either string may be empty. Strings can be up to a few thousand characters, so use O(len(a)*len(b)) time and try to keep memory to O(min(len(a), len(b))).

Implement
edit_distance(a: str, b: str) → int
Examples
in["kitten","sitting"]out3
What a strong answer looks like

State your approach and its time/space complexity out loud before you optimize. Handle the edge cases (empty input, duplicates, overflow), and say why you chose this over the brute force. Green tests are the floor, not the grade.

0:00 of about 25 min
InputExpectedGot
["kitten","sitting"]3not run yetsample