Levenshtein Edit Distance
Reveal prefix edit costs, compare insertion/deletion/substitution candidates and trace one optimal string alignment.
Free theory articleReveal prefix edit costs, compare insertion/deletion/substitution candidates and trace one optimal string alignment.
Concept & interpretation
How many single-letter edits turn one string into another? Levenshtein distance minimizes insertions, deletions and substitutions. Keeping an equal letter costs nothing. The explorer compares whole strings, so every source and target letter must be accounted for; it does not search for a matching substring.