Whiz Kid Woes

NewScientist Enigma 1412 - Oct 7 2006 by Albert Haddad

I have a five-digit TOTAL, a six-digit AMOUNT and several other whole numbers, all expressed in words written in capital bold letters, where dfif letters stand for diff digits and the same letters stands for the same digit.

A few curious properties are noticeable. For instance, if you add ANY amount to my TOTAL, and then divide by say, A value, the result is a whole number.

And if you subtract AN amount from my AMOUNT, and then divide by say ANY value the result of course is ANY amount.

How much is my five-digit VALUE?

I solved it quickly but I realized that I had received the issue almost after a month it was actually sent so I couldn’t take part in their competition draw!

My answer was : VALUE = 89140

After I confirm this answer in the next issue of the magazine I’ll post how I deduced this.

CONFIRMED on Nov 20!

1. First I deduced from second condition that AMOUNT = ANY*ANY + AN
2. Now I wrote this simple perl program to iterate three digit unique values which produce unique six digit sum:

for my $i ( 317 .. 999 )
{
next if &repeat ($i);
my $s = $i * $i + substr ($i,0,2);
next if &repeat ($s);
next if substr ($s,0,1 ) ne substr ($i,0,1);
next if substr ($s,4,1) ne substr ($i,1,1);
print "ANY=$i : AMOUNT=$s\n";
}


repeat just checks to make sure there was no duplicate in the number itself.

3. I got two results:
ANY=963 : AMOUNT=927465
ANY=976 : AMOUNT=952673

4. Discarding second one because we have same codes for ‘Y’ and ‘U’.

5. Leaving only only one result! Common sense suggested that V cannot be 0 thus: L=1 M=2 Y=3 U=4 T=5 N=6 O=7 A=9 V=8 E=0

6. Net result was confirmed to be 89140

ITCN was really messy this year (more or less like last year!). It has become a market-place for shop and brand owners to market their ‘imported’ products! The cell-phone companies had TV actors and actresses on their stalls to attract the audience and they were throwing… guess what?… kit kats (the mini-bars) at the audience. I was there with a spectacular bunch of people from FAST. Munir is the one who called me up to join The Adams Family group (which was only then conceived!). The most interesting stall (to me, at least) was of a company in Islamabad who are doing 8-layered PCBs. Unfortunately, they are into commercial production so I didn’t attempt ot pursue them into giving me an educational trip to their facility.

Here are two computer casings that looked like a vacuum cleaners at first!

There was a dancing stand on one of the stalls which was quite nice. I have uploaded the video.

This is almost the mid of our summer vacations and I’m enjoying every bit of it! I’ve finished re-watching entire TNG and Enterprise series. I did DS9 before the end of the vacations! =) Watched MI3 in the theater and also spent a night with friends at the farm house. I’ve been jogging, eating, swimming… oh boy! I’m on fire! On the techie side, I’ve done a few projects and I’ve been checking out Ruby and Ruby on Rails! Still have about 25 mores days before the vacations end. After that, I’d set my phasor on kill!