Word ladders the right way: BFS, bidirectional search, and why Dijkstra is overkill

Word ladders the right way: BFS, bidirectional search, and why Dijkstra is overkill If you’ve ever spent a lunch break procrastinating with a word ladder puzzle—transforming "COLD" to "WARM" one letter at a time—you’ve essentially been performing a graph traversal. It’s a classic computer science problem that feels simple on the surface but quickly reveals the difference between a "naive" implementation and a production-ready one. Whether you are building a tool for Wordlewonk —anoth