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Solution: Similar String Groups

Understand how to apply Union-Find to group similar strings by detecting connections through character swaps. Explore the algorithm to determine the number of connected similarity groups among anagram strings and analyze its time and space complexity in detail.

Statement

Two strings x and y are considered similar if they are either exactly the same or can be made identical by swapping at most two different characters in string x.

We define a similarity group as a set of strings where each string is similar to at least one other string in the group. A string doesn't need to be directly similar to every other string in the group — it just needs to be connected to them through a chain of similarities.

Given a list of strings strs, where each string is an anagram of the others, your task is to determine how many such similarity groups exist in the list.

Constraints:

  • 11 \leq strs.length 300\leq 300

  • 11 \leq strs[i].length 300\leq 300

  • strs[i] consists of lowercase letters ...