Alphabet Animals

ID: alphabetanimals

Difficulty: 6.2

CPU Time: 2 seconds

Memory: 1024 MB

Solution

For this, take the last letter of the word given, consider it l. For every word read in, store it in some mapping of its first character to a list of all words that begin with that letter. If the word also starts with l, store that on a list of possible words to say (or just access that respective mapping later). If there are no words to possibly output, output a "?" and quit. If there are, for every word, check if either there are no words to output that start with this word's last letter, or the special case where this word starts and ends with the same letter, and is the last word on this list; if so, output it and a "!". Otherwise, output the first word on the list of possible words.