BFS for transforming one word to another I'm having a hard time understand the reasoning in the solution of 18.7 in Elements of programming interviews (EPI):

Let $s$ and $t$ be stings and $D$ a dictionary, i.e., a set of strings. Define $s$ to produce $t$ if there exists a sequence of strings from the dictionary $P = \langle s_0,s_1,\ldots,s_{n-1} \rangle$ such that the first string is $s$, the last string is $t$, and adjacent strings have the same length and differ in exactly one character. The sequence $P$ is called a production sequence. For example, if the dictionary is {bat,cot,dog,dag,dot,cat}, then ⟨cat,cot,dot,dog⟩ is a valid production sequence.
Given a dictionary $D$ and two strings $s$ and $t$, write a program to determine if $s$ produces $t$. Assume that all characters are lowercase alphabets. If $s$ does produce $t$, output the length of a shortest production sequence; otherwise, output -1.
Hint: Treat strings as vertices in an undirected graph, with an edge between $u$ and $v$ if and only if the corresponding strings differ in one character.

Here is the solution:

The number of vertices is $d$, the number of words in the dictionary. The number of edges is, in the worst-case $O(d^2)$. The time complexity is that of BFS, namely $O(d+d^2) = O(d^2)$. If the string length $n$ is less than $d$ then the maximum number of edges out of a vertex is $O(n)$, implying an $O(nd)$ bound.

So I agree with number of vertices being $d$, and the  worst case number of edges is $d^2$. We know that the complexity of BFS is $O(V+E)$, hence $O(d+d^2) = O(d^2)$, though if we used a set to record visited vertices (or removed a vertex once we visited it from the graph), that should reduce BFS's complexity to $O(d)$. But then things get funky.

If the string length $n$ is less than $d$ then the maximum number of edges out of a vertex is $O(n)$.

don't agree with this. Imagine we have 5 words in our dictionary $\{ab, ac, ad, ae, af\}$, so $d=5$ and $n=2$. All these vertices are connected and you can see that each vertex has 4 edges leaving it... which is more than $O(n)$. You can have $26^n$ possible edges leaving the vertex, but you only have $d$ vertices in the graph, so the number of edges leaving a single vertex should be $O(d)$.
I ultimately agree that the final complexity of the algorithm is $O(nd)$, but I calculated that simply given that we can visit up to $d$ vertices (we use a visited set to prevent cycles) and for each vertex visited one we iterate over the string of length $n$ as we look for differences in the alphabet of lower characters $O(26nd) = O(nd$).
Interested to hear what people think,
Thanks :)
The maximum degree of a vertex is $25n$, since this is the number of words which can be obtained by changing a single character. I'm not sure how you get to $26^n$.

You are writing "$4$ is more than $O(n)$" (where $n=2$). This is completely meaningless, since $O(n)$ stands for a function bounded by $Cn$ for some unknown constant $C$. If you don't know the value of $C$ (in this case, $C=25$) then you cannot possibly determine that $4 &gt; Cn$.