Levenshtein Distance

Levenshtein Distance measures how many single-character edits—insertions, deletions, or substitutions—are needed to change one word or string into another. It quantifies how similar or different two sequences are by counting the minimum number of steps required for transformation. For example, changing "cat" to "bat" requires one substitution ('c' to 'b'), so their distance is 1. This concept helps in applications like spell checking, DNA analysis, and natural language processing, where understanding how closely related different strings are can be valuable.