Why is my power operator (^) not working?

In C ^ is the bitwise XOR:

0101 ^ 1100 = 1001 // in binary

There's no operator for power, you'll need to use pow function from math.h (or some other similar function):

result = pow( a, i );

pow() doesn't work with int, hence the error "error C2668:'pow': ambiguous call to overloaded function"

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/cmath/pow/

Write your own power function for ints:

int power(int base, int exp)
{
    int result = 1;
    while(exp) { result *= base; exp--; }
    return result;
}

Well, first off, the ^ operator in C/C++ is the bit-wise XOR. It has nothing to do with powers.

Now, regarding your problem with using the pow() function, some googling shows that casting one of the arguments to double helps:

result = (int) pow((double) a,i);

Note that I also cast the result to int as all pow() overloads return double, not int. I don't have a MS compiler available so I couldn't check the code above, though.

Since C99, there are also float and long double functions called powf and powl respectively, if that is of any help.