#P2462. Longest Word Chain Game
Longest Word Chain Game
Longest Word Chain Game
Given an English word list where each word consists of lowercase letters without any special symbols, your task is to form the longest possible word chain following the rules below:
- The next word in the chain must have exactly one more letter than the previous word.
- Every letter in the previous word must appear in the next word with at least the same frequency.
For example, consider the word list:
ab arc arco bar bran carbon carbons cobra crab crayon narc
A valid chain is:
ab bar crab cobra carbon carbons
The objective is to determine the maximum length of a valid word chain. Note that a single word is considered a valid chain of length 1 in case no extension is possible.
inputFormat
The first line contains an integer n
, the number of words.
The following n
lines each contain a word.
outputFormat
Output a single integer representing the length of the longest valid word chain that can be formed.
sample
3
a
ab
abc
3