Credited with solving this puzzle. I added an extra twist to this one to make the phrase have some meaning and I set out to submit a second one that was inappropriate to make the judge chuckle 🙂
To mark the announcement by IBM CEO Ginni Rometty about a new era of cognitive computing (http://www.ibm.com/cognitive/outthink/), this month’s Ponder This challenges you to create a uniquely solvable verbal arithmetic equation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbal_arithmetic) using English words, whose result is WATSON, and which is composed of only these six letters.
Here are some (wrong) examples:
- TATTOO-NOT=WATSON – insolvable
- NOT*SON+ON*ANTON=WATSON – the only solution is invalid since it contains a leading zero in “ANTON”
Remember that different letter must have different numerical value.
My PC solution:
TWO * TOTS – SAW + TOONS + ON – SAT – AT – NOON = WATSON
W=2 A=4 T=1 S=9 O=8 N=7
My Inappropriate Solution:
((A + SON – SAW – A + TOOTS – AT – TOWN) * AN) + (NOW + WANTS + TO + WOO – TO – SOW – OATS + SOON + ON + TAT + TWAT) = WATSON
W=7, A=5, T=1, S=9, O=4, N=2
