Ponder This Challenge - November 2015 - Watson verbal arithmetic

Ponder This Challenge:

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.

Solution

• Click here to view the solution

  SON*SON=WATSON was suggested by many; another common variation was ON*ON*ON*ON=WATSON; but Matthew Rips suggested SON^O=WATSON and Eitan Levine suggested N^O^W=WATSON

  Here are a few more solutions:
  A*TOAST-TO=WATSON (Chris Shannon)
  TOWNS+WANTS+TOWNS+WANTS+TOWNS+WANTS=WATSON (Peter St. John)
  SO*WANT=WATSON (Alan Murray, Johnny Waltos)
  (TO+A)*TOWN=WATSON (Derrick Liu)
  SON*NOT*A+SWAN=WATSON (Luka Zaplotnik)
  STATS+A*TON*WOW=WATSON (Matthias Bussas)
  ANTS*ON=WATSON (Gregory Giecold)
  SANTA + SAW + SON + WANTS + SONATA + AS = WATSON (Kang Jin Cho - thanks for the lovely pictures)

  Some gave a solution too long to repeat, like On+ON+...(98761 times)...+ON=WATSON (Kevin Petrychyn)
  Don Dodson also sent us an exercise where WATSON=123456: TWAS*NOW-SOWN SAT=WATSON
  Andrew Breadmore suggested an acrostic solution: WON+AT*TWO*SO+OWN+NOW = WATSON
  Kipp Johnson suggested a nice exercise: NANOWATT mod SONATA = WATSON

Solvers

• Dan Dima (27/10/2015 12:33 PM IDT)
• Martin Husar (27/10/2015 03:01 PM IDT)
• Radu-Alexandru Todor (27/10/2015 10:31 PM IDT)
• Hamidreza Bidar (27/10/2015 11:09 PM IDT)
• Federico T. Gimenez Molinelli (27/10/2015 11:44 PM IDT)
• Gregory Giecold (28/10/2015 07:11 AM IDT)
• Lorenz Reichel (28/10/2015 10:50 AM IDT)
• James Dow Allen (28/10/2015 01:29 PM IDT)
• Huafeng Jiang (28/10/2015 04:25 PM IDT)
• Uoti Urpala (28/10/2015 05:42 PM IDT)
• Stéphane Higueret (28/10/2015 10:00 PM IDT)
• John Tromp (29/10/2015 12:46 AM IDT)
• Alex Zdanowicz (29/10/2015 04:06 AM IDT)
• Leandro Araújo (29/10/2015 07:39 AM IDT)
• Kang Jin Cho (29/10/2015 08:52 AM IDT)
• Suk Hyun Hwang & Kevin White (29/10/2015 08:08 PM IDT)
• Robert Gerbicz (29/10/2015 08:19 PM IDT)
• Shouky Dan & Tamir Ganor (29/10/2015 09:44 PM IDT)
• Kevin Petrychyn (29/10/2015 10:01 PM IDT)
• Clive Tong (30/10/2015 10:04 AM IDT)
• Benjamin Lui (30/10/2015 02:07 AM IDT)
• Johnny Waltos (30/10/2015 05:01 AM IDT)
• Matthew Rips (30/10/2015 08:57 AM IDT)
• Tomáš Jurík (30/10/2015 10:37 AM IDT)
• Luka Zaplotnik (30/10/2015 11:34 AM IDT)
• Don Dodson & David Dodson (30/10/2015 07:19 PM IDT)
• Derrick Liu (30/10/2015 07:57 PM IDT)
• Alan Murray (30/10/2015 10:24 PM IDT)
• Franciraldo Cavalcante (31/10/2015 05:40 PM IDT)
• Graham Hemsley (31/10/2015 06:23 PM IDT)
• Motty Porat (31/10/2015 10:53 PM IDT)
• Shirish Chinchalkar (01/11/2015 12:18 AM IDT)
• David Greer (01/11/2015 01:30 PM IDT)
• Raymond Lo (01/11/2015 02:37 PM IDT)
• Kipp Johnson (01/11/2015 02:41 PM IDT)
• Joseph DeVincentis (01/11/2015 07:50 PM IDT)
• Alex Fleischer (01/11/2015 10:31 PM IDT)
• Aviv Nisgav (01/11/2015 12:08 PM IDT)
• Max Nepokroeff (02/11/2015 12:18 AM IDT)
• Arthur Vause (02/11/2015 12:51 AM IDT)
• Michael Rosola (02/11/2015 01:50 AM IDT)
• Andres Trapanotto (02/11/2015 06:06 AM IDT)
• Jens Voss (02/11/2015 03:28 PM IDT)
• Phil Benamy (02/11/2015 07:49 PM IDT)
• Nikhil Sahasrabudhe (02/11/2015 07:51 PM IDT)
• Chumeng Zheng (02/11/2015 09:30 PM IDT)
• Jesus Sanz (03/11/2015 12:37 AM IDT)
• Jesse Rearick (03/11/2015 12:39 AM IDT)
• Chuck Carroll (03/11/2015 03:24 AM IDT)
• Umut Uludag (03/11/2015 01:06 PM IDT)
• Hakan Summakoğlu (03/11/2015 03:25 PM IDT)
• Nicolas Bitouze (03/11/2015 04:56 PM IDT)
• Sergey Koposov (03/11/2015 06:31 PM IDT)
• Ioan Marius Popdan (03/11/2015 10:35 PM IDT)
• Liubing Yu (04/11/2015 03:05 AM IDT)
• Vivek Nema (04/11/2015 11:17 AM IDT)
• Eitan Levine (05/11/2015 12:00 PM IDT)
• Larry Kearney (05/11/2015 05:00 PM IDT)
• Dieter Beckerle (05/11/2015 05:49 PM IDT)
• Adam Wear (05/11/2015 06:49 PM IDT)
• Fabio Filatrella (05/11/2015 07:12 PM IDT)
• Marcelo De Barros (06/11/2015 02:43 AM IDT)
• Varun Ahluwalia (06/11/2015 04:14 AM IDT)
• Nyles Heise (06/11/2015 05:35 AM IDT)
• Vladimir Dorofeev (06/11/2015 03:38 PM IDT)
• Jitesh Jain (06/11/2015 11:49 PM IDT)
• Saurabh Agarwal (07/11/2015 11:09 AM IDT)
• Andreas Puccio (08/11/2015 12:32 AM IDT)
• Boris Kazimir Hostnik (08/11/2015 09:54 AM IDT)
• Bart De Vylder (08/11/2015 02:43 PM IDT)
• Andrew Breadmore (09/11/2015 03:31 AM IDT)
• Shaleen Deep (09/11/2015 10:32 PM IDT)
• Mathias Schenker (10/11/2015 12:34 AM IDT)
• Bryce Herdt (10/11/2015 10:41 AM IDT)
• Ty Norrish (10/11/2015 06:50 PM IDT)
• Mukund R (11/11/2015 06:26 AM IDT)
• Satendra Mani Tiwari (11/11/2015 06:44 AM IDT)
• Andreas Stiller (11/11/2015 08:59 PM IDT)
• Jörg Binder (12/11/2015 11:06 PM IDT)
• Peter St. john (13/11/2015 02:38 AM IDT)
• William Stewart (13/11/2015 03:04 AM IDT)
• Simon Foster (13/11/2015 03:28 PM IDT)
• Harald Bögeholz (15/11/2015 12:57 AM IDT)
• Gary M Gerken (16/11/2015 06:36 AM IDT)
• Natasha Priya de Sousa (16/11/2015 11:43 AM IDT)
• Natasha De Sousa (16/11/2015 10:01 PM IDT)
• Jesse Noyes (17/11/2015 01:34 AM IDT)
• Srikanth Myskar (18/11/2015 01:14 PM IDT)
• Jason Mah (18/11/2015 11:16 PM IDT)
• Cody Pfau (19/11/2015 10:09 PM IDT)
• David Dunkley & Avis Dunkley (20/11/2015 12:05 AM IDT)
• Roberto Tauraso (20/11/2015 11:40 AM IDT)
• ByeongYeon (Jackie) Ryu (22/11/2015 01:48 AM IDT)
• Albert Stadler (22/11/2015 06:55 PM IDT)
• Yan-Wu He (23/11/2015 02:11 PM IDT)
• Di Luo (23/11/2015 03:12 PM IDT)
• Shisen Luo (24/11/2015 06:26 AM IDT)
• Armin Krauss (24/11/2015 04:14 PM IDT)
• Nigel Brumpton (25/11/2015 08:48 PM IDT)
• Anders Bisbjerg Madsen (27/11/2015 04:24 PM IDT)
• Chris Shannon (28/11/2015 07:44 PM IDT)
• Victoria Woo (28/11/2015 10:11 PM IDT)
• Michael Schuresko (28/11/2015 11:17 PM IDT)
• Rajesh Sathiyanarayanan (29/11/2015 09:46 AM IDT)
• David Friedman (29/11/2015 05:20 PM IDT)
• Erik Wünstel (01/12/2015 01:16 AM IDT)
• Woosung Jung (01/12/2015 04:21 AM IDT)
• Claudio Hüni (01/12/2015 10:13 AM IDT)