Problem 196. love is an n-letter word

Created by Alfonso Nieto-Castanon

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Given a list of N words, return the N-letter word (choosing one letter from each word) with the property of having the least distance between each pair of two consecutive letters (if there are multiple optimal solutions return any one of them).

Example: s1 = {'abcd','bcde','cdef','defg'}; should return s2 = 'dddd'; (with total letter-distance = 0)

Example: s1={'aldfejk','czoa','vwy','abcde'}; should return s2='love'; (with total letter-distance = 27: 'l'-'o'=3 + 'o'-'v'=7 + 'v'-'e'=17 ; compare for example to the possible word 'aave' which has a total letter-distance of 38)

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Last Solution submitted on Dec 07, 2025

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Martijn on 31 Jan 2012

does somebody understand why

diff( ‘test’ )

in my solution 19016 causes this error

Error: License checkout failed.
License Manager Error 0
For further information, refer to the FLEXnet Licensing documentation,
available at "www.flexerasoftware.com".
Troubleshoot this issue by visiting:
http://www.mathworks.com/support/lme/R2011b/0
Diagnostic Information:
Feature: MATLAB_Distrib_Comp_Engine
License path: 13501@10.206.97.41:13501@10.195.79.113:/tmp/matlabpref/.matlab/R2011b_licenses:/opt/mlsedu/matlab/R2011b/licenses/license.dat:/opt/mlsedu/matlab/R2011b/licenses
FLEXnet Licensing error: 0,0.

it doesn’t in my local Matlab ( 2011a )

Martijn on 31 Jan 2012

apparently it tries to call an overloaded diff ( probably from the symbolic toolbox ) for which it doesn’t have a license

Alfonso Nieto-Castanon on 31 Jan 2012

@Martijn: I am not sure why that is happening but in the meantime using "diff(double('test'))" should work fine

Alfonso Nieto-Castanon on 1 Feb 2012

fixed look-up table hack

DNYANESH on 20 Mar 2025

good

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Problem 196. love is an n-letter word

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Problem 196. love is an n-letter word

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