Checking if a list of strings can be chained

Question

Question

Implement a function bool chainable(vector v), which takes a set of strings as parameters and returns true if they

Answer 1

Here's a case where your algorithm doesn't work:

ship
pass
lion
nail

Your start and end lists are both s, p, l, n, but you can't make a single chain (you get two chains - ship->pass and lion->nail).

A recursive search is probably going to be best - pick a starting word (1), and, for each word that can follow it (2), try to solve the smaller problem of creating a chain starting with (2) that contains all of the words except (1).