Justin Rogers DigiTec

Spoiler pages for the FindNearbyWords challenge

The goal of the exercise is to find an efficient way to take an existing word and lookup all words in a dictionary that differ from the original by only a single character. This is the kernel function for larger algorithmic problems like the Word Ladder, where you try to find the shortest route between two words, by changing one character at a time, and where each intermediate step must be in an intial dictionary of words.

Bruce Force

The simplest algorithm possible will take the input word and then compare it against every word in the dictionary, character by character, and count the differences. If the character differences between the word are just 1, then we add it to our list, otherwise we reject it. JavaScript has the Array.filter method which does precisely what we want and we just supply a function which returns true or false depending on if our criterion are met.

It is possible to optimize differsByOne further to get more benefits, but given t

Some additional JSFiddle links that I produced afterwards to experiment with timing around when the browser would create its scope chains. It turns out browsers don't tend to create scope chains until the first time the event is fired.

In this example we have a button in a form. We can check its scope first, then change it, then check it again to see one behavior. We can then change scope and execute it to see a different behavior. http://jsfiddle.net/oko08kaw/

This example switches us from one form to another, which is a slightly more complicated behavior but achieves similar results. http://jsfiddle.net/p7bu92jw/2/

	/* At the time of first commit, each of thse properties was not immediately tested.
	and each of the values using default is just to avoid typing a real value */
	input {
	/* pretty much any background change */
	background: default;
	background-color: default;
	background-repeat: default;
	background-position: default;
	background-position-x: default;
	background-position-y: default;

	// @initialWord = DOMString
	// @dictionary = sequence<DOMString>
	// @@returns = sequence<DOMString>
	var findNearbyWords = function (initialWord, dictionary) {
	}

	dictionary EventInit
	{
	boolean bubbles = false;
	boolean cancelable = false;
	};

	dictionary UIEventInit : EventInit
	{
	Window? view = null;
	long detail = 0;

	typedef unsigned long ErrorCode;
	typedef void* MemoryHandle;

	ErrorCode OutOfMemory = 0x1;
	ErrorCode Success = 0x2;
	ErrorCode TerribleFailure = 0x3;

	void FreeHandle(MemoryHandle handle)
	{
	}

	var xhtml_tags_chrome_prototypes = {
	"DOCTYPE": "HTMLUnknownElement",
	"a": "HTMLAnchorElement",
	"abbr": "HTMLElement",
	"acronym": "HTMLElement",
	"address": "HTMLElement",
	"applet": "HTMLAppletElement",
	"area": "HTMLAreaElement",
	"article": "HTMLElement",
	"aside": "HTMLElement",

	partial interface Navigator
	{
	Promise<sequence<VRDevice>> getVRDevices();
	}

	[
	{ "iface" : "HTMLElement", "member": "className", "owner": "Jim" },
	{ "iface" : "SVGElement", "member": "className", "owner": "Joe" },
	{ "iface" : "SVGElement", "member": "style", "owner": "Jim" },
	]