An ASCII thing.

don't make it too easy :)

well, this has given me some motivation to program a bit in a special language again, thank you!

This is pretty hard puzzle based on pure luck or high mathematical skill, so many possible combinations, too short amount of time, even with two added letters.

Bleh, recursive programming... oh well, I better get to it :D

Ooh, what if we had diagonals, too? :D

Well, I'm considering giving this up, I'm getting really tired. With what I remember from constrained programming with Prolog, I managed to find five different solutions, all matching the criteria (well, technically only four of them, because I got the first one before the hints were published -- my first solution didn't take them into account, but the rest of the numbers was ok). None of them worked. If you want, you can contact me over Steam and I'll send you my solutions.

Grr, divide and conquer algorithm y u no work.

Great puzzle. Feel like I'm on the verge of solving this... Come ooonnnn!

That Super MNC key is going to be sooo sweeeetttt ;)

I build a program with permutations, and it seems to take ages to run... or maybe it's stuck in a loop :p

edit: crap, I shouldn't have used brute-force, I guess back-tracking would've been better... I don't rally want to redo everything so I'll just let it run as long as possible.

edit2: 20^20 permutations is the worst case scenario, I'd say this problem is way harder than I thought it would be :p

Yay for the first logic based puzzle since this one. nom nom nom

Got them all, thanks :D

It's been a long time since I had this fun on a puzzle. Thank you for that, and for making me open eclipse to code again (:

"you found 3880 ways of adding up 83 & 4 other numbers (of the 24 remaining) to make 422?"
and now when i gotta go to work brain sudenly flops in to a solution with **ry c***s*on

I found ALL 56000+ permutations possible with those characters. Then worked from there.

I am so tired... -_-

Well, seems like I need to learn some programming, just wish we had some more time :/

That was fabulous. Thank you.

Spent half a day programming. Finally got down to 600 combinations which helped :)

Can someone please post a way to solve this without programming after it is over? I tried, but only got to be sure about that two certain characters have to be in a certain column. After that I couldn't deduce anything for certain anymore.

I will be posting the solution when the giveaway has ended(which is noted by the creator). For those who wanted this.

using logic, I narrowed down 1 column to a certain set, but I can't get anywhere with that until I get another limit... also have the general idea for 2 different sets, but yeah, this is definitely the job of a programmer or someone who started this puzzle when it first came up. I wont be able to finish it in time.

So, no solution yet?

My head hurts.

so what was the solution to this?

I thought the OP would post it, but oh well:
nUa5y
FuRJF
ZSSNX
CYs2G
rgHXc