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Stumped by 4th grade math!!!
So a friend of mine was helping her 4th grade neice with her math homework, and butted heads with this problem, in which you are to solve for each letter, with each letter being a unique integer:
HOCUS
+POCUS
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PRESTO
Three fairly intelligent adults have now all knocked our heads against this and we can't come up with a viable solution. Here are our assumptions, maybe you can tell us where we're going wrong, but it looks unsolvable:
P = 1. It's clearly carried over from H+P in the previous column, and it couldn't be anything higher than 1.
If P = 1 then H has to be 9 or 8 for H+P> 10 (if it's 8, then there has to be carryover from the previous column, O+O=E)
R has to be 0; if P=1 and H = 9 or 8, then H+P (or H+P+1, carryover from the previous column) has to be 10; it could be 11 (if H is 9 AND there's carryover from the previous column) but that would make R 1 and P is already 1; so it could only be 0)
O has to be even since O=2S and there can't be any carryover from a previous column.
We've tried brute force and couldn't find any workable solution in which each of the letters represent a unique number. HELP!
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