Edit Distance

Edit distance is a way to measure how similar two strings or words are by counting the smallest number of changes needed to make them the same. These changes include inserting, deleting, or replacing a single character. For example, transforming "cat" into "cut" requires one replacement ('a' to 'u'), so the edit distance is 1. This concept helps in various applications like spell checking, DNA analysis, and plagiarism detection, providing a quantitative way to compare text sequences based on how many simple edits are needed to match one to another.