5
$\begingroup$

Welcome to the Hit Parade on KIGI radio. That completes our rundown of the top 10-there's some absolute classics in there this week! And what a bunch of new entries as you can see if you've been following us during the programme! This week we have a new number 1 song and would you believe it-it's one of this week's new entries! Straight in at the top it's....

crrrk....static....radio station disappears into oblivion

Never mind...you don't have to frantically try and call them up to find out this week's chart topper. Because fortunately, it's logical that this song should have made it to the top, so you can work out which of the new entries has made it to Number 1 and why!

Edited to include listings here for those who don't wanna go hunting:

2 Police-Geno
3 Dana-Bright Eyes
4 Mud-Oh Boy!
5 ABBA-SOS
6 Blondie-Heart o'Glass
7 Elton John-I'm Still Standing
8 ELO/Darts-Theme from the Movie 'Xanadu'
9 Wizzard-Call Me

And the new entries:

The Beatles-Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever
Queen-Dancing Queen
Status Quo-Caroline
David Essex-Hold Me Close
Tina Turner-The Best
The Four Seasons-Sherry
|improve this question
$\endgroup$
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Why don't you use the advertisement-free stack.imgur.com like everyone else? It's even quite easy to embed images stored there, so we don't have to follow a link and can see the image directly in the post. $\endgroup$ – M Oehm Feb 16 '17 at 9:56
  • $\begingroup$ By the way.. is it me or are some track titles fake? Bright Eyes is sung by Art Garfunkel, The Police never sung a song called Geno and "Darts-Theme from the Movie" should be replaced by Olivia Newton? Or is this part of the puzzle ;) $\endgroup$ – Mike Limburg Feb 16 '17 at 10:01
  • $\begingroup$ It's all part of the puzzle-the artists and songs are exactly as depicted. I tried using imgur stack,but got a funny message telling me I shouldn't be there-curious.I'll give it another try. $\endgroup$ – Kit-Ginevra Feb 16 '17 at 11:26
  • $\begingroup$ @Kit-Ginevra: You don't need to actually go to stack.imgur.com, just add/upload the image to your question and it will automatically create the link for you, easy as that. $\endgroup$ – Levieux Feb 16 '17 at 12:24
  • $\begingroup$ Any reason why there are 9 songs in a top 10? $\endgroup$ – Caspar Kleijne Feb 16 '17 at 15:56
8
$\begingroup$

I think I have solved this problem.

So, this is a problem related to

finding the 'digital root' of the characters. What this means is that we have to keep on summing numbers until we get a single digit number...that is Digital Root of 123 would be 1+2+3=6 , while Digital Root of 547 would be 5+4+7=16=1+6=7...So basically the iterated sum of digits.

Now, in this case , we have to apply the same concept and all we need to do is

convert the letters of the alphabet in the string to numbers...(ignoring the special characters like "-", or "/" )...with positional index numbers as in { A=1, B=2, C=3.....,X=24, Y=25, Z=26}...and then find the Digital Root of the string.

Performing this operation on the string Police-Geno we have,

(16+15+12+9+3+5+7+5+14+15) % 9 = 2.... That's the no. 2 song right ? ;)
If you are wondering what % is btw , then it's called the modulo operator , that is a % b is the remainder when a is divided by b. It can be shown that Digital Root of any number n = n % 9....

Next, doing the same thing on Dana-Bright Eyes we find

its Digital Root = (4+1+14+1+2+18+9+7+8+20+5+25+5+19) % 9 = 138 % 9 = 3...And guess what? We can see that it's number 3 on the list.

So, we have cracked it, haven't we...

We can likewise check that Digital Root of all songs in the list correspond to their positions in the list...

And so, all we need is to find...

A string from the new entries' list whose digital root equals 1.

Checking through the list of new entries, we easily find, that for the song...

"The Beatles-Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever" we have Digital Root
= (496 % 9) = 1. SO WE ARE DONE !!!!

THE NUMBER ONE SONG IN THE LIST

(And it's a new entry) is:
"The Beatles-Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever"

That's our answer,and this cipher, I feel is successfully cracked.

The Idea First came to my mind when @Kit-Ginevra said that the cipher won't work for 10 songs...;)....but would for 9 songs...

that's when digital roots first came to my mind.

Please do read the answer and leave your thoughts in the comments as I am new to The Puzzling StackExchange Family. Thank You. :)

|improve this answer
$\endgroup$
  • $\begingroup$ oh my eyes....! $\endgroup$ – Rubio♦ Apr 17 '17 at 7:06
  • $\begingroup$ Well done +1 and Welcome to PSE! You can go through the edits Rubio made to your answer for future reference :-) $\endgroup$ – Techidiot Apr 17 '17 at 7:16
  • $\begingroup$ And also try not to use Capital and Bold letters. They are seen as equivalent to shouting. $\endgroup$ – Sid Apr 17 '17 at 7:27
  • $\begingroup$ Ya, please do teach me...how to "write" the answers...@Sid, I can't see some lines of my answer on the laptop screen after Rubio edited it...only yellow patches instead...Why is that ... Would you please explain...what do i need to do to see the characters there ? :) $\endgroup$ – Swarnabja Bhaumik Apr 17 '17 at 7:30
  • $\begingroup$ Oh okay...i see i just need to hover over that yellow patch...but how to bring them in my ans ? :) $\endgroup$ – Swarnabja Bhaumik Apr 17 '17 at 7:32

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.