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Input/Output

Eric Berlin

The answer to the twenty-five clues are as follows:

  1. ENS
  2. COIN
  3. HIDE
  4. LOBS
  5. NOSE
  6. OSLO
  7. TREE
  8. UNIT
  9. HORSE
  1. REACT
  2. SENSE
  3. SHALE
  4. SHORE
  5. SOBOL
  6. ALMOND
  7. CREATE
  8. NATHAN
  9. SALMON
  1. ENGLISH
  2. NOMADIC
  3. NOTATES
  4. NOTHING
  5. SHINGLE
  6. CONTINUOUS
  7. THIRD DEGREE

Once each of the instructions is assigned to a box in the Input/Output machine, you can sort these words into five chains:

Input word: ALMOND
Change last letter; move to first position: SALMON
Delete even-positioned letters; add letter to the front: OSLO
Move middle letters to either end; put new letter to middle: SOBOL
Delete all duplicated letters and scramble: LOBS

Input word: TREE
Place two letters between every letter, and one new letter at the end: THIRD DEGREE
Extract state postal abbreviations; put them together to form a word: HIDE
Replace middle one or two letters with three new letters: HORSE
Scramble: SHORE

Input word: NOTHING
Drop last letter; change all vowels: NATHAN
Add letter to the last name of a famous person with this first name: SHALE
Replace middle one or two letters with three new letters: SHINGLE
Scramble: ENGLISH

Input word: NOMADIC
Replace Roman numerals with new letters: NOTATES
Delete palindromic section; scramble what remains: NOSE
Take a synonym of this word: SENSE
Delete all duplicated letters and scramble: ENS

Input word: UNIT
Spell backwards; place three letters on either side: CONTINUOUS
Extract state postal abbreviations; put them together to form a word: COIN
Take a synonym of this word: CREATE
Delete all duplicated letters and scramble: REACT

The first letters of the input and output words are: AL  NE  NE  TS  UR

These bigrams, when rearranged, spell the answer to the puzzle: NEURAL NETS.