Give up?

Okay, so WWWDOT - GOOGLE = DOTCOM, and M and E are interchangeable, and there are no leading zeros. Can you solve this equation? Turns out plenty of you can. In fact, maybe you've already taken the Google Labs Aptitude Test, which we published a couple months ago as a recruiting tool and general shout-out to our math-and-CS-minded peers.

Anyway, where WWWDOT - GOOGLE = DOTCOM is concerned...

Off[General::"spell1"]
chars=Characters/@ToLowerCase/@{"WWWDOT","GOOGLE","DOTCOM"};
uchars=Union[Flatten[chars]];
eqn = First[#]-Plus@@Rest[@]&[FromDigits[#,10]&/@chars]==0;

...and so on. If you followed that, you might want to check out MathWorld.com's impressive list of solutions to the thornier GLAT problems. The authors, Ed Pegg, Jr. and Eric Weisstein, declined to tackle most of the GLAT's more whimsically or philosophically inclined essay questions (wimps), but they did, with considerable aplomb, meet the challenge of composing a search-seasonality-related haiku:

MathWorld's search engine
seemed slowed this May. Undergrads
prepping for finals.

Congratulations for a job well done to Ed, Eric, and everyone else who sent in their own solutions. Those Googlers who understand this stuff were impressed with the quality of the work we received. And the rest of us enjoyed the haiku.

Michael Krantz
Google Blog Team