Yes thats true. I am also not unexperienced. I was most active at bright-shadows.net. Sad that it is offline at the moment. I solved more than hundred challenges there (about 1/3) and a few on a couple of other sites.
Some challenges took me days. Tenacity is a really needed in the real world while these challenges are prepared to be solved. So it might be a good thing when challenges inexorable. But I think that is more a facet for technical challenges where one detail, in extrem a single bit, might make you fail. Challenge 1/17 is more a knowlegde challenge where such things might not be in its sense.
There is anohter aspect: Fairness upon challengers. When all the other challengers solved this challenge without any help than it would be unfair if I get some. Or vice versa. I don't know if others got help on this or other challenges.
So here is what I will do: I'm gonna try it again on my own. I will collect all possible candidate names I can think of and their variantions. And then I will take my self written brute force algorithm. :) and let it generate all variations of the candidates. Don't be afraid, I will not brute force the server. I will see what I've got and maybe the number of results can be handled manually.
If that does not work I can still ask for help.
By the way. This textarea thing behaves strange on layouting linebreaks / paragraphs.