The categories are presented. You need to come up with a word that is in the category that will help maximise your points. No word is allowed to be more than 8 letters.

I did not include coming up with the word possibilities because that is a completely different problem which I'm not interested in solving in perl. (Maybe someone else is...)

Example (which I'm making up now, with out seeing the original puzzle - my wife didn't show it to me):

1. US State
2. Car part
3. Type of precipitation
4. Member of NATO
5. Olympic Games site
6. In the kitchen

Note that this is not the game that the words in my list are for, it's just the idea. Each category gets one answer, you need to see how high of a score you can get. An example answer is in the back of the book with a crazy-high total.

One way to solve it is to come up with a list of answers for each category, and then see what combination of these answers gives the highest score, which is what we were doing here. My wife came up with the answers in my OP, and then I set about getting the computer to find the best option.

In her game, there were ten categories. Not all games have the same number of categories.