Last year I was looking at my very old programs and I came across a cryptarithm solver that I wrote in khem… Pascal. I wrote it to solve one such riddle published in a crossword magazine back in a day (as a side note: when I found it I was actually looking for something completely different in a first place /as it is usually the case/).

As per wikipedia: cryptarithm or word addition, is a type of mathematical game consisting of a mathematical equation among unknown numbers, whose digits are represented by letters. The goal is to identify the value of each letter.

Since I came across it I started wondering if there was a generic solution for this type of puzzle and after googling around I found out that it is possible – some people created dedicated web sites that handle all the solving work for you.

Using these available tools I created these 2 below so if you are bored, you can try to solve them 😉 [as you can see it is DFIR-related 😉 ]

• RCE+DFIR=ELEET

         RCE
      + DFIR
       ----- 
     = ELEET

• MFT+FILE+FILE+FILE+FILE=NTFS

          MFT
       + FILE
       + FILE
       + FILE
       + FILE
       ------
       = NTFS

And if you struggle you can always cheat and use this solver by Naoyuki Tamura (that’s how I created these anyway 🙂 )