If you only care about the row with the shortest distance (and assuming no precomputed optimizations) you can save compute cycles by exiting the algorithm as so

If you only care about the row with the shortest distance (and assuming no precomputed optimizations) you can save compute cycles by exiting the algorithm as soon as the distance is guaranteed to be larger or equal to the shortest distance thus far. For very large searches the algorithmic complexity drops to roughly linear in the number of rows, the length of the search string, and the shortest distance thus far (the distance to any strings whose length differs by more than the shortest distance thus far need not be computed at all).