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I've never heard this question before, but I assume it's finding words with the lowest Levenshtein distance between wordA and wordB and then wayfinding the route from wordA to WordB using the least steps possible?

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correct, I think it is actually a good interview problem for discussion and don't mind it. What I do mind is the attitude of some of my colleagues that if a candidate can't immediately jump to the optimal answer, then they are a pass.

Sounds like something I'd likely fail. Without putting pen to paper, I can get from taking the two words and expanding Lev distances until we find a word in common, and then mapping a a route from A to that word, then from that word to B, but whatever I wrote would probably be horribly inefficient, at best.

I would also wager that whomever was asking that sort of question would probably be looking for some optimal form of the answer, and having never encountered it, oh well.

Can you englihten me on how edit distance helps here? I don't see why insert/remove/move is relevant in this case.

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