February 2025: Top Score (Give or Take)
February 2025: Top Score (Give or Take)
Date: February 2025
Link: click here
Solved on: February 11, 2025
The Puzzle
We are given an image containing various words and seemingly unrelated numerical directions on the side (click the link above or here to see the image). We are told that the answer is a proper noun.
Initial Observations/Questions
- What are the mysterious directions on the right side? What do those numbers correspond to? What do the colors mean?
- The words are in groups of 7, seemingly split into 14 on the top and 14 on the bottom, and each group of 14 words are organized in alphabetical order.
- What does the title ‘give or take’ imply?
Initial Strategy
I had various initial approaches which led me to the correct approach:
- I looked at the scrabble sum of each word to see if it would lead me to anything. I noticed that the top group of words scored 40pts higher then the bottom half (back to this later), but I didn’t find anything else useful, so I moved on.
- I looked at the length of the words themselves, and noticed that the top group had 7 more characters total - but still, wasn’t able to conclude anything useful.
Strategy
Note: The following strategy may not be the most efficient process to solve the problem, but it is how I went about it in my head.
The approaches above didn’t yeild anything useful until I took out the word unscrambler. Initially, this was just another ‘let me just try this’ method, but it actually led to some progress.
I noticed some of the words on the image were really weird that were included. What does ‘cuirass’ mean? I figured they must have been included for a reason, and when sent to the word unscambler (with a wildcard * since this word specifically doesn’t unscramble to anything), I found the word ‘jurassic’. I thought this was a good step in the right direction.
I started to unscramble some of the ‘weird’ words with wildcards (again, since they dont unscramble to anything helpful themselves). I found the following (bold = wildcard letter):
- NOCTURNES » ENCOUNTERS
- ISOMER » MEMOIRS
With 3 seemingly random and weird words that unscramble, with a wild, to a ‘normal’-like word was what I felt was a good step in the right direction. I turned my focus to the title.
The phrase ‘Give or Take’ in the title made more sense now; it was almost like the words in the second group were ‘taking’ letters (with the wildcard), and so that must mean the top group must be ‘giving’ letters. At this point, I started to put the top words into the unscrambler and looking for words with length-1, in which the letter removed is the letter given to the bottom group.
| top group word (give): | …gives letter: | …to become: | Then, bottom group word (take): | …takes letter to become: |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SURFACED | F | CRUSADE | RIDDLE | FIDDLER |
| ASTIR | I | STAR | TRIONYM | MINORITY |
| BLACK | L | BACK | SAT | LAST |
| SWARM | M | WARS | HOE | HOME |
| STICKER | C | STRIKES | SOLE | CLOSE |
| OKRA | O | ARK | FOR | ROOF |
| ADMIRERS | M | RAIDERS | ISOMER | MEMOIRS |
| WRAP | P | WAR | ARK | PARK |
| HOAGIES | O | GEISHA | LANE | ALONE |
| PREMISE | S | EMPIRE | CHILDREN’S | SCHINDLER’S |
| DITHER | E | THIRD | NOCTURNES | ENCOUNTERS |
| DRINK | R | KIND | TROPE | REPORT |
| JOLTS | J | LOST | CUIRASS | JURASSIC |
| WILTS | W | LIST | LORDS | WORLDS |
Now, you may have noticed the secret phrase in the gives letter… column and are wondering why the rows are ordered like that…
For the first set of directions “1 [red] on the 6 [red]”, we can use the words FIDDLER and ROOF (both red, second group, since they are taking letters). from above to get Fiddler on the Roof. In doing so, this assigns FIDDLER the number 1 and ROOF the number 6 (this also assigns their counterparts, the words that gave the letters, to the same numbers, so CRUSADE is 1 [blue] and ARK is 6 [blue]). Another example is “2 [blue] 4 [blue]”, which would be Star Wars, assigning STAR to 2 and WARS to 4, which is why you see STAR in row 2 and WARS in row 4.
Writing out the secret column message, you get FILM COMPOSER JW, which is a major hint (along with the 14 movie titles) to the answer to the puzzle.
Answer
Thus, the final answer to this month’s puzzle is John Williams.
About Me
I am currently a Sophomore at Northeastern University studying Computer Science and Mathematics, with a goal to work in the quantitative finance field. I love working through these type of problems and using code to make the solution more elegant. More information on me and some projects I’m proud of can be found on my website below.