Donald Knuth's Dancing Links paper is a beautiful exploration of the power of linked lists. He uses a table with doubly linked lists (for rows and cols) to solve omino tiling. The linked lists allow for an elegant unpicking of rows (and re-attaching when backtracking)

The paper's a really enjoyable read, Knuth's tone throughout is "look at this, this is fun"

https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0011047