Edit Distance (Levenshtein)

Vladimir Levenshtein, 1965

Introduced by Vladimir Levenshtein in 1965, the edit distance algorithm fills a 2D table where dp[i][j] represents the cost of converting the first i characters of one string into the first j characters of another. Each cell is computed from its top, left, and diagonal neighbors, corresponding to delete, insert, and substitute operations. The visualization color-codes cells by operation type and traces the optimal alignment path in coral.