Simon, you may have missed x.z and z, but you are no numpty, and still solve way better than I can. I don’t watch this channel for perfect solves, I watch this to improve my solving, and the process is far more important to me than the final result.
0:13 When the webcam catches Simon in the act of transforming from mild-mannered family man into legendary puzzle enthusiast Sudokuman merely by switching glasses. 😉 11:40 "Maybe I'm meant to do sudoku to start this puzzle. Oh sorry, am I meant to?" 🤣🤣Never change, Simon! The puzzle was lovely, I enjoyed it very much!
1 in the middle was literally my first digit! Since there has to be a 1 in each of the 31 cages, if you put a 1 in box 5 anywhere other than the middle, you simply can’t fit a 1 into all the cages.
It's always satisfying to solve a puzzle one way (my first digit was the central digit, which led me to the top-right corner) and then watch Simon solve it in completely the opposite way (getting his first digit via the bottom-left), but both paths use the same logic.
I finished in 24:45 minutes. Everyone was right about the geometry of this puzzle, as it was excellent and so satisfying to spot. I think my favorite part was figuring out which 40 cages had to have either 14 or 23 missing. The geometry of the puzzle made that part very satisfying. I even got a little bonus enjoyment as I colored all the 59's in the grid with green and red as a final Christmas flourish. I very much enjoyed the way this puzzle worked. As always, it feels good to beat Simon's time. Great Puzzle!
no complaints about the start, but i did spot something in the middle that could have helped quite a bit. at 33:33 once you figure out the contents of the 12 cage in box 1, you can ask where 7 goes in the 40 cage. it can only go in r1c4. this displaces the 8 pencil mark into the 31 cage, disambiguating it as a 68 variant.
It's so weird to watch Simon solving the puzzle in a completely different way than I did. The centre digit was the first I placed, Simon only gets it at the very end. Absolutely lovely puzzle!
This puzzle reconfirmed that I'm horrible at geometry, but I managed to muddle through on my own in 101:22. I simply cannot spot things like 2 being excluded from the 40 cage in box 3, which Simon spotted immediately. And then his rapid-fire brain bombarded him with new insights which kept him from noticing the exact same pattern with 3 in box 7, which was the first thing I noticed when he pointed out box 3 - never change, Simon.
A fascinating bit of logic I picked up partway through in my solve of this (around 37:24 in your solve) is that you have a 5-9 pair in column 1, which means the digits that are outside the 31 cage in box 4 MUST be a 6-8 pair instead of a 5-9. Excellent solve!
Great puzzle. It was so nice to find the connection between all the 31 boxes and which digits are missing in them as well as corner cells visibility into the 40 cages. 14:39 for me
Right out the gate it's possible to center-mark all four corners with 1234, because the 40 cages are all missing only 14 or 23 and the corners each see the whole of their closest 40 cage by sudoku...
My first pencil mark was 1234 in the four corners. My first digit was 1 in the center (because anywhere else made it impossible to put 1 in all four 31 cages). Simon didn't do either! I might have beaten his time if I hadn't futzed around looking at SET for five minutes. What 1 in the center does for you is that after that's known, the wing cells of the 40 cages can't have 1,2,3 or 4, so each Phistomefel corner has exactly one of the two pairs 23 or 14.
I was waiting for him to realize that! That's the first thing I did, then I realized what all the cells that weren't in cages had to be, thanks to THE SECRET.
hi simon! thank you for the video! im feeling quite down today, and this videos are really soothing. even if i cant solve most of the puzzles i still love to watch because of the sincerity and calm in your videos. thank you !
You mentioned doing the puzzle in the “correct order” would be able to let you blitz it. I recognized that because the corners saw the entirety of their 40 cages that the corners had to be the digits 1-4. Then I went down a rabbit hole tracking those corner digits which lead me to box 7 and the middle of the break in was about the same but I had wasted a bunch of time looking at the corners. I finish in 59 minutes. So while looking in the “correct order” probably would allow someone to blitz that puzzle, getting stuck in logical loops by looking in the wrong places will slow you down tremendously 😂😂 I did like this puzzle, it’s been one of my favorite cage sudokus (I usually struggle with this rule set and therefore don’t enjoy them as much) Wonderful solve, wonderful puzzle, wonderful channel
There was a moment where Simon mentioned Phistomafel set theory logic and I was bummed he didn't go down that rabbit hole. It's quite a nice piece of logic that probably would have sent him over the moon for appreciating the construction. When he's trying to determine the nature of the left side 40 cages, you can look to the Phistomefel ring to see there are currently two given 2's and one given 3. You can eventually find that it's impossible to include both three 2's and three 3's on the ring simultaneously meaning that his 23 pair in box 4 was resolvable which naturally gives you the box 1 and box 7 cage information.
Nice solve! If there's an elegant way to go about this puzzle, I didn't find it either. I started by putting "1234" as options in all 4 corners, and then looked at the 2x2s in the bottom corners first, because of the high cages. After that, I just chipped away, in much the same way you did. My solve was a bit faster than yours, but I wasn't explaining every thought to a camera. Taking that into account, I think your time is definitely within par, so I don't think you should worry that you missed something big. Thanks again for making these videos! I find it very fascinating how you approach these!
10:30 The bottom cage and block, the excluded digits are determined as 59. In the others, I used the corner cages to eventually disambiguate the 59/68 choice. Back to the bottom, the cell protruding into the center is the third of the 59 triple. I called it A, and got the 59A triple in the bottom row. I used letters to represent the cells protruding into the center block, and colors for everything else. Of course, for the 40 cages, the excluded cells must add to 5, and be in the 4x4 corner squares. The other two corner cells must contain the cage's protruding cells. 40:30 Recall that 59 were the only digits out of block 8's cage. Therefore the 6 is in the cage and must be in the protrusion. 42:00 Similarly, if 59 were out of block 6's cage, where would you put the 8 in the cage?
Wow! My first thought that the 31 cage totals could only be made up from two sets of digits, or rather the missing digits being two possible sets: [6,8] and [5,9]. Since none of the cages contained a 1 yet I started thinking where they could go and found that the only valid way involved rows [4,6] and columns [4,6] which meant that 1 had to go right in the center of box 5. The 1 that Simon only found after almost 45 minutes :astonished_face: The result of this is that in boxes 2,4,6 and 8 the digits outside the cage are all from the set [5-9] which is particularly useful for r4c9 as this digit needs to be part of the 10 cage in box 3 as well and thus gets restricted to being either a 5 or 6. It's fairly easy to see that if you enter 6 this replicates into the 40 cage in box 9 and the 31 cage in box 8, leading up to having two 6s on row 1. 18 minutes start to finish and I'm actually pretty slow at entering those digits.
It took a good while to break, the left corner was tricky, but there was steady progress along the way which made it very enjoyable. Once the 59 pairs started to appear, it solved very smoothly. Left the 10-cage resolve to the end. Thank you!
I was listening to a lot of this towards the end and was wondering why there was a lot of talk about 'naked singles'. Had to come back to the video and wonder what I was watching/listening too. Great video and continues to make me think that I would never be able to do something like this on my own without a few years of training. Keep up the good work.
14 is the key. I used that and given 8, to get the 59 and 68 pairs at once, from which point it was easy to deduce, that the center number must be 1 and all the side ones are 14+the number.
Great solve. The early realization that the 31 cages could only be one of two flavours (either missing 59, or 68) was perfect, but then was a little under utilized in my opinion. Nevertheless, i really enjoyed this solve.
Brilliant puzzle and solve. Solved it in 53:14. Interestingly, at the very beginning I got that 1 in r5c5 (because it has to be both in row 5 and column 5 in box 5. I did not even use the fact that the 40 cages must miss either 14 or 23. Instead I used the geometry of the 40 cages (which Simon also used), but started in box 3, and that was where I first got the first few neat deductions. Simon also didn't use the property that the cells r1c5, r5c1, r5c9, and r9c5 all see the corresponding 31 cages, so can't contain 1234. That such different approaches both solve the puzzle just shows how great a puzzle this is.
Was anyone else waiting for him to ask where the two was in box nine? Because that would have place it in eight long before he figured it out. He had done all the logic for it and then just jumped.
It also allows you to work out the 40 cage through box 7 cannot have 2 or 3 in it, too. The only places 2 and 3 could go in that 40 cage were at the bottom of column 3, but that broke the 23 pencilmark higher in that column.
Really doubted that I would be able to do this one, but surprisingly I managed! Quite a different solve path than Simon, but I got there eventually! Nice Puzzle
Solved in 28:50. Huh, I didn't notice there are only 2 sets of digits that can make up the 31 cages. That would have been useful, probably. I think noticing that the corners see the whole of a 40 cage and are therefore 1, 2, 3 or 4 sped things up a bit.
A great video, and I would have said that I could try to solve this puzzle because it is "just" a killer - but there is a lot going on here which you navigated so skillfully, Simon. Thank you for the video! (And thanks, riffclown, for the puzzle!)
I'm surprised that Simon didn't use the secret to figure out that the corners had to be low digits, 1 to 4, since one only had 5 to fill the 2 cells left to play with. I started with box 9 and 8, and my first digit was actually the 3 in the corner. :D My time however is bounds and leaps behind... at about 2H and 45 min. But for me, is more rewarding to be able to do it, than how fast. ;)
btw I did high digits first - if all of the 31 cages are missing 59 then both 5 and 9 have to go in R5C5. Note also that R19C5 and R5C19 have to be digits missing from their related cages. Geometry then means that the three digits in the side boxes outside the 31 cage have to be a pair that add to 14 plus the cage digit from box 5. The central digit therefore has to appear in every 31 cage and can only be 1. I didn't spot the logic on low digits until much later.
Relatively early on, I was able to disambiguate the 2 and 3 in box four using Phistomefel. If the right cell on that domino were a 2, that would put three 2s on the ring. But if you put three 2s on the ring, you need space for three 3s as well (as 2s and 3s are a package deal in the corner sections), and Sudoku didn't allow that.
Something available early on is that cells in R1C5, R5C1, R5C9, R9C5 see all the cells in the nearby 31 cage, which allows one to deduce the entry in R5C5.
Yes indeed, and as both of their neighbours along the edges of the grid never can add up to 14, the digits in R1C5, R5C1, R5C9, R9C5 must all be from 5689! Similarly, it is also available early that all the corner cells must be from 1234, as the all see all the cells in their nearby 40 cages.
37:02 for me. That was fun. Just a little bit of counting, but 5 (golden rings) was important! And of course, when I checked the puzzle, I counted down from 9 (ladies dancing).
1h36 with loads of try/fail/undo, even if I found the corners trick and the center cell. The fast breaking logic stayed in the fog and never popped up in my mind. I'll check Simon solve ^_^
96 minutes so my solve could hardly be described as efficient, but never has any path diverged so much from yours. I got the middle digit first as this digit had to appear in all 4 31 cages, this created some x wings in rows and columns 46 which then did geometry on the 40 cages. I would be interested to know what the setters intended or preferred path is.
I'll have to watch the solve as by its length (and my 21:20 minute solve time), Simon has found an enjoyably logical way to solve this that I didn't need as.... spoiler.... the box 8 cage only has one possible solution and that led me down a different path... I assume...
I was hoping to use some geometry, but it didn’t seem to help much with the solve. At one point I used the Phistomefel ring: once I had figured out which sum-to-five pair was in each L-shaped cage, I knew there could be at most two 2s on the phistomefel ring. This ruled out a 2 from column 3 of the left 31 cage. Not super useful. It would be interesting if someone found some useful set theory.
Far be it from me to criticize Simon, since he routinely solves puzzles I can never even break into, but one thing I observed right away that might have made things easier has to do with the cage geometry. For each of the 31 cages, the part sticking into Box 5 could have immediately been pinned to one of two places in the outer side boxes. And then the four corners of the puzzle could have been reduced to 1-2-3-4 by virtue of the fact that they see every cell in the nearby 40-cages, which Simon noted are each missing two digits that sum to 5.
You know exactly where the second 5 or 9 is that isn't green. Think about it. Where does R9C5 go in the 31 cage just above it? It doesn't! Therefore it must be a 5 or 9. That's your 2nd 5/9. The red digit is something else.
I joined a choir about 10 years ago, we sang some songs from Les Miserables at a local culture house. Then I watched the musical with Anne Hathaway and my heart was broken.
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
This was a joy watching you work through the meta of these cages. Thank you for giving it a go and thank you to those that recommended.
Really liked the geometry. Have a wonderful Christmas
Thank you so much for reading my poem, thought you might enjoy that
It was lovely!
It was quite fun! Something about Simon's read of it sounded kind of spooky.
Only 12? Given the average puzzle in this channel nowadays, 12 given digits is like a gift from god himself xD
My thoughts exactly 😂
Simon, you may have missed x.z and z, but you are no numpty, and still solve way better than I can. I don’t watch this channel for perfect solves, I watch this to improve my solving, and the process is far more important to me than the final result.
0:13 When the webcam catches Simon in the act of transforming from mild-mannered family man into legendary puzzle enthusiast Sudokuman merely by switching glasses. 😉
11:40 "Maybe I'm meant to do sudoku to start this puzzle. Oh sorry, am I meant to?" 🤣🤣Never change, Simon!
The puzzle was lovely, I enjoyed it very much!
1 in the middle was literally my first digit! Since there has to be a 1 in each of the 31 cages, if you put a 1 in box 5 anywhere other than the middle, you simply can’t fit a 1 into all the cages.
Of all the variants, Killer Cages are the one I am most comfortable with. I'll pause here and give it a go.
It's always satisfying to solve a puzzle one way (my first digit was the central digit, which led me to the top-right corner) and then watch Simon solve it in completely the opposite way (getting his first digit via the bottom-left), but both paths use the same logic.
I finished in 24:45 minutes. Everyone was right about the geometry of this puzzle, as it was excellent and so satisfying to spot. I think my favorite part was figuring out which 40 cages had to have either 14 or 23 missing. The geometry of the puzzle made that part very satisfying. I even got a little bonus enjoyment as I colored all the 59's in the grid with green and red as a final Christmas flourish. I very much enjoyed the way this puzzle worked. As always, it feels good to beat Simon's time. Great Puzzle!
Another amazing puzzle from riffclown.
no complaints about the start, but i did spot something in the middle that could have helped quite a bit. at 33:33 once you figure out the contents of the 12 cage in box 1, you can ask where 7 goes in the 40 cage. it can only go in r1c4. this displaces the 8 pencil mark into the 31 cage, disambiguating it as a 68 variant.
It's so weird to watch Simon solving the puzzle in a completely different way than I did. The centre digit was the first I placed, Simon only gets it at the very end. Absolutely lovely puzzle!
This puzzle reconfirmed that I'm horrible at geometry, but I managed to muddle through on my own in 101:22. I simply cannot spot things like 2 being excluded from the 40 cage in box 3, which Simon spotted immediately. And then his rapid-fire brain bombarded him with new insights which kept him from noticing the exact same pattern with 3 in box 7, which was the first thing I noticed when he pointed out box 3 - never change, Simon.
Simon changing tactics every 3 minutes! 😆
A fascinating bit of logic I picked up partway through in my solve of this (around 37:24 in your solve) is that you have a 5-9 pair in column 1, which means the digits that are outside the 31 cage in box 4 MUST be a 6-8 pair instead of a 5-9. Excellent solve!
Great puzzle. It was so nice to find the connection between all the 31 boxes and which digits are missing in them as well as corner cells visibility into the 40 cages. 14:39 for me
Right out the gate it's possible to center-mark all four corners with 1234, because the 40 cages are all missing only 14 or 23 and the corners each see the whole of their closest 40 cage by sudoku...
My first pencil mark was 1234 in the four corners. My first digit was 1 in the center (because anywhere else made it impossible to put 1 in all four 31 cages). Simon didn't do either! I might have beaten his time if I hadn't futzed around looking at SET for five minutes.
What 1 in the center does for you is that after that's known, the wing cells of the 40 cages can't have 1,2,3 or 4, so each Phistomefel corner has exactly one of the two pairs 23 or 14.
I was waiting for him to realize that! That's the first thing I did, then I realized what all the cells that weren't in cages had to be, thanks to THE SECRET.
The UK intelligence service card with the Christmas challenge has an Easter egg in it that Mark missed. The animals first letter spell out "Rudolph".
Not only there are 12 givens, but also 12 cages! Beautiful setting 🙂
hi simon! thank you for the video! im feeling quite down today, and this videos are really soothing. even if i cant solve most of the puzzles i still love to watch because of the sincerity and calm in your videos. thank you !
You mentioned doing the puzzle in the “correct order” would be able to let you blitz it. I recognized that because the corners saw the entirety of their 40 cages that the corners had to be the digits 1-4. Then I went down a rabbit hole tracking those corner digits which lead me to box 7 and the middle of the break in was about the same but I had wasted a bunch of time looking at the corners. I finish in 59 minutes. So while looking in the “correct order” probably would allow someone to blitz that puzzle, getting stuck in logical loops by looking in the wrong places will slow you down tremendously 😂😂
I did like this puzzle, it’s been one of my favorite cage sudokus (I usually struggle with this rule set and therefore don’t enjoy them as much)
Wonderful solve, wonderful puzzle, wonderful channel
There was a moment where Simon mentioned Phistomafel set theory logic and I was bummed he didn't go down that rabbit hole. It's quite a nice piece of logic that probably would have sent him over the moon for appreciating the construction. When he's trying to determine the nature of the left side 40 cages, you can look to the Phistomefel ring to see there are currently two given 2's and one given 3. You can eventually find that it's impossible to include both three 2's and three 3's on the ring simultaneously meaning that his 23 pair in box 4 was resolvable which naturally gives you the box 1 and box 7 cage information.
Break through - watch 1s in cages, breaks box 1. Lovely puzzle. Oh Christmas Three!
Nice solve!
If there's an elegant way to go about this puzzle, I didn't find it either. I started by putting "1234" as options in all 4 corners, and then looked at the 2x2s in the bottom corners first, because of the high cages. After that, I just chipped away, in much the same way you did.
My solve was a bit faster than yours, but I wasn't explaining every thought to a camera. Taking that into account, I think your time is definitely within par, so I don't think you should worry that you missed something big.
Thanks again for making these videos! I find it very fascinating how you approach these!
A poem that is “truly weird and rather magical” - ok that’s got my attention! ❤ it!! Well done, Tygannus! Well read, Simon!
This is my first time hearing the Christmas version of the 3 in a corner song and I must say I'm a big fan! Very fun and appropriately festive.
10:30 The bottom cage and block, the excluded digits are determined as 59. In the others, I used the corner cages to eventually disambiguate the 59/68 choice. Back to the bottom, the cell protruding into the center is the third of the 59 triple. I called it A, and got the 59A triple in the bottom row.
I used letters to represent the cells protruding into the center block, and colors for everything else.
Of course, for the 40 cages, the excluded cells must add to 5, and be in the 4x4 corner squares. The other two corner cells must contain the cage's protruding cells.
40:30 Recall that 59 were the only digits out of block 8's cage. Therefore the 6 is in the cage and must be in the protrusion.
42:00 Similarly, if 59 were out of block 6's cage, where would you put the 8 in the cage?
Simon calling something "sick" 😂 yeah boi!!
Wow! My first thought that the 31 cage totals could only be made up from two sets of digits, or rather the missing digits being two possible sets: [6,8] and [5,9]. Since none of the cages contained a 1 yet I started thinking where they could go and found that the only valid way involved rows [4,6] and columns [4,6] which meant that 1 had to go right in the center of box 5. The 1 that Simon only found after almost 45 minutes :astonished_face: The result of this is that in boxes 2,4,6 and 8 the digits outside the cage are all from the set [5-9] which is particularly useful for r4c9 as this digit needs to be part of the 10 cage in box 3 as well and thus gets restricted to being either a 5 or 6. It's fairly easy to see that if you enter 6 this replicates into the 40 cage in box 9 and the 31 cage in box 8, leading up to having two 6s on row 1. 18 minutes start to finish and I'm actually pretty slow at entering those digits.
The first thing i figured out quickly was where the 1 goes in the middle box. The rest went...not so quickly
@25:39
"That' is sick!" 😂😂 had to rewind just to make sure that's what Simon actually said lmao
It took a good while to break, the left corner was tricky, but there was steady progress along the way which made it very enjoyable. Once the 59 pairs started to appear, it solved very smoothly. Left the 10-cage resolve to the end. Thank you!
Brilliant and very clever puzzle.
I was listening to a lot of this towards the end and was wondering why there was a lot of talk about 'naked singles'. Had to come back to the video and wonder what I was watching/listening too. Great video and continues to make me think that I would never be able to do something like this on my own without a few years of training. Keep up the good work.
14 is the key. I used that and given 8, to get the 59 and 68 pairs at once, from which point it was easy to deduce, that the center number must be 1 and all the side ones are 14+the number.
Great solve. The early realization that the 31 cages could only be one of two flavours (either missing 59, or 68) was perfect, but then was a little under utilized in my opinion. Nevertheless, i really enjoyed this solve.
Brilliant puzzle and solve. Solved it in 53:14.
Interestingly, at the very beginning I got that 1 in r5c5 (because it has to be both in row 5 and column 5 in box 5. I did not even use the fact that the 40 cages must miss either 14 or 23. Instead I used the geometry of the 40 cages (which Simon also used), but started in box 3, and that was where I first got the first few neat deductions. Simon also didn't use the property that the cells r1c5, r5c1, r5c9, and r9c5 all see the corresponding 31 cages, so can't contain 1234. That such different approaches both solve the puzzle just shows how great a puzzle this is.
That was fun, thanks. Still hard to beat a good killer, which I believe is the motto of the National Union of Assassins.
Was anyone else waiting for him to ask where the two was in box nine? Because that would have place it in eight long before he figured it out. He had done all the logic for it and then just jumped.
It also allows you to work out the 40 cage through box 7 cannot have 2 or 3 in it, too. The only places 2 and 3 could go in that 40 cage were at the bottom of column 3, but that broke the 23 pencilmark higher in that column.
Really doubted that I would be able to do this one, but surprisingly I managed! Quite a different solve path than Simon, but I got there eventually! Nice Puzzle
Solved in 28:50. Huh, I didn't notice there are only 2 sets of digits that can make up the 31 cages. That would have been useful, probably. I think noticing that the corners see the whole of a 40 cage and are therefore 1, 2, 3 or 4 sped things up a bit.
A great video, and I would have said that I could try to solve this puzzle because it is "just" a killer - but there is a lot going on here which you navigated so skillfully, Simon. Thank you for the video! (And thanks, riffclown, for the puzzle!)
I'm surprised that Simon didn't use the secret to figure out that the corners had to be low digits, 1 to 4, since one only had 5 to fill the 2 cells left to play with. I started with box 9 and 8, and my first digit was actually the 3 in the corner. :D My time however is bounds and leaps behind... at about 2H and 45 min. But for me, is more rewarding to be able to do it, than how fast. ;)
Took time out to solve this one - what a magical puzzle! Looking forward to Simon's attempt now.
btw I did high digits first - if all of the 31 cages are missing 59 then both 5 and 9 have to go in R5C5. Note also that R19C5 and R5C19 have to be digits missing from their related cages. Geometry then means that the three digits in the side boxes outside the 31 cage have to be a pair that add to 14 plus the cage digit from box 5. The central digit therefore has to appear in every 31 cage and can only be 1.
I didn't spot the logic on low digits until much later.
Actually there was a little mote to it than that
Relatively early on, I was able to disambiguate the 2 and 3 in box four using Phistomefel. If the right cell on that domino were a 2, that would put three 2s on the ring. But if you put three 2s on the ring, you need space for three 3s as well (as 2s and 3s are a package deal in the corner sections), and Sudoku didn't allow that.
This was where I went too. It took me well over an hour to get there but proud of that one
With only 12 given digits?. That's 12 more then we usually get these days.
12 digits is almost like it's Christmas already
Such a beautiful puzzle
Please do more "how I set" videos
Something available early on is that cells in R1C5, R5C1, R5C9, R9C5 see all the cells in the nearby 31 cage, which allows one to deduce the entry in R5C5.
Yes indeed, and as both of their neighbours along the edges of the grid never can add up to 14, the digits in R1C5, R5C1, R5C9, R9C5 must all be from 5689! Similarly, it is also available early that all the corner cells must be from 1234, as the all see all the cells in their nearby 40 cages.
This one was quite difficult for me. I really struggle with cage math sometimes, so the work in the bottom right tripped me up quite a bit.
The twelve given digits of Christmas
37:02 for me. That was fun. Just a little bit of counting, but 5 (golden rings) was important! And of course, when I checked the puzzle, I counted down from 9 (ladies dancing).
Attempt two a couple days later. 18:54, but I unfortunately remembered some of the logic.
Timestamps seem wrong in the description today
I adore Shakespearean sonnets!
14:56 for me. Great puzzle!
1h36 with loads of try/fail/undo, even if I found the corners trick and the center cell. The fast breaking logic stayed in the fog and never popped up in my mind. I'll check Simon solve ^_^
Is this the largest number that has ever appeared in an "Only _____ Given Digits!" video title?😄
96 minutes so my solve could hardly be described as efficient, but never has any path diverged so much from yours. I got the middle digit first as this digit had to appear in all 4 31 cages, this created some x wings in rows and columns 46 which then did geometry on the 40 cages. I would be interested to know what the setters intended or preferred path is.
Simon ask yourself where 5 and 9 go in row 7 and it will tell you where the other 59 is in box 8.
Simon is not just color blind, he is given digit blind. (Only in jest.)
would've been a shame if there hadn't been a christmas three in the christmas star puzzle 😅
Just been watching the famous Sudoku with only 4 digits and now we have 3 tmes as man digits!!
12 ENTIRE given digits???
another exciting puzzle
Could this be a 3 ??? Yes , Simon , it s the last in the grid 😅😂
that orange in box 5 was done dirty by simon
A good solve but I feel that Simon may have done it a lot quicker by first doing the obvious sudoku that was available.
I managed to make it, after confirming some points by watching the video up to 27:11
I'll have to watch the solve as by its length (and my 21:20 minute solve time), Simon has found an enjoyably logical way to solve this that I didn't need as.... spoiler....
the box 8 cage only has one possible solution and that led me down a different path... I assume...
I was hoping to use some geometry, but it didn’t seem to help much with the solve. At one point I used the Phistomefel ring: once I had figured out which sum-to-five pair was in each L-shaped cage, I knew there could be at most two 2s on the phistomefel ring. This ruled out a 2 from column 3 of the left 31 cage. Not super useful. It would be interesting if someone found some useful set theory.
Far be it from me to criticize Simon, since he routinely solves puzzles I can never even break into, but one thing I observed right away that might have made things easier has to do with the cage geometry. For each of the 31 cages, the part sticking into Box 5 could have immediately been pinned to one of two places in the outer side boxes. And then the four corners of the puzzle could have been reduced to 1-2-3-4 by virtue of the fact that they see every cell in the nearby 40-cages, which Simon noted are each missing two digits that sum to 5.
The corners see the whole cage. So it must always contain one of the 2 missing digits.
I started with the 31 cages and that there was only two ways to make 31 one with a 8 and one with a 9
I'm going to need a war hammer for this forty cage.
neat puzzle, 29:02 for me
00:45:37
You know exactly where the second 5 or 9 is that isn't green. Think about it. Where does R9C5 go in the 31 cage just above it? It doesn't! Therefore it must be a 5 or 9. That's your 2nd 5/9. The red digit is something else.
Only 12 digits. Or as we say on this channel, so many?!
32:38 🥹🥳
the orange digit is 5/6/9.
actually by maths and that given limitation it's 6. lol
you can't put a 5 or 9 in a 31 cage with an 8 in it.
21:37 for me
56:29 for me.
Not unusually, many praises to you initially, Simon. (6) (JK)
36 minutes
I joined a choir about 10 years ago, we sang some songs from Les Miserables at a local culture house. Then I watched the musical with Anne Hathaway and my heart was broken.
Again, distracting and unnecessary colours…