Each of the letters A,E,F,H,O,R,T,W,and X represents a different digit from 0 to 9 in the addition below. Can you find out which letters represent which numbers?

 WORTH
   THE
+EXTRA
------
EFFORT

(In reply to re(6): Not a Solution by Richard)

Actually, yes, I modified a CRYPTARITHM solver program that I had written several years ago so that it worked in base 11.  I ran it while the puzzle was still in the queue to verify there was a unique solution.  It found 16 putative solutions in base 11, but 14 of them involved leading zeros. One of the remaining two solutions, I presented before, but that involves a digit other than 0 to 9.  That leaves the intended solution for this puzzle as unique.

The program took less than 20 minutes to run in QuickBasic (DOS programming language) in a Command Prompt window within Windows XP on a 2 GHz machine.  VB or C programmers could probably get their programs to run faster, especially as the program I ran was not specifically designed for this puzzle but for generalized alphametics (cryptarithms) that are typed in as input.

Posted by Charlie on 2005-09-04 15:51:00