Code RoomDelete distance
MediumPrep Room Coding #1179

Delete distance

CodingAlgorithms & data structuresMid–Senior~28 min

Given two strings word1 and word2, return the minimum number of single-character DELETIONS required (from either string) to make the two strings equal. Each step deletes exactly one character from one of the strings. 0 <= len(word1), len(word2) <= 500, lowercase letters. Example: 'sea' and 'eat' -> 2 (delete 's' and 't', both become 'ea').

Implement
min_delete_distance(word1: str, word2: str) → int
Examples
in["sea","eat"]out2
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 28 min
InputExpectedGot
["sea","eat"]2not run yetsample