Although there's still the problem of new viewers wandering away during the 6 minutes before the video is actually about the puzzle. Are new viewers really going to make the effort to find and click on a chapter mark before they know whether the video will actually interest them? I seriously doubt it. Chapters are helpful to those of us who already know we want to watch (most of) the video, but they don't really address the channel-growth problem that was the reason for tinkering with the format in the first place.
Maybe a brief standard remark about the start that the rules will be read out loud after the announcements have been made, is a good solution to that problem.
@@steve470 I think you may have a point about new viewers. But it does depend on what they are looking for. CtC has such a reputation that it might not matter; they might discover the chapters right off the bat and skip to what they are interested in; they might be intrigued by all of the personal stuff at the beginning and discover that CtC is more than just a "how to solve variant sudoku" channel ... I think that the actual thing, as I recall, that the tweaks were attempting to address was whether YT would recommend a CtC video after someone who watched something else. Sticking with the video would also be part of it, I am sure.
I think the best compromise is to have the rule set on the intro, but he doesn't read the rules until after the announcement. That way viewers can read the rules ahead of time while he's thanking patrons
I would also like it if they would move all the repetition and cliches to the beginning, like the secret, the tricks of a German whisper, the perimeter of a yin-yang, all that jazz.
Wooo 🎉 Was so happy this evening to discover that this had been featured. I checked it after noticing a sudden surge of people playing the puzzle on Logic Masters Germany this evening and wondering why. Of all the puzzles I've submitted to Cracking the Cryptic, this is my favourite and was the one I most had my fingers crossed for that it would be chosen to appear. I had such fun making this after thinking of the initial idea (and the title!) I started off by playing round with lines and seeing how they affected eachother, and I soon realised that a given 5 in the middle could serve a few different purposes. I wanted to have a line that nobody would have seen before, and came up with the idea of the unlucky line when trying to think of another type of line that would need to have particular digits left off of it. I knew I wanted each line at the start to have at least two options it could be, and for the break-in to be discovering a pair of lines that both had the same two options. Simon called it an RT pair on line types, which was very similar to in my walkthrough document where I mentioned it was a bit like a meta X-wing on line types. This one idea really pleased me, and then I wanted the break-in to be a third line which had these two options plus a 3rd. And once the meta x-wing is discovered, this 3rd option becomes forced. Simon explored both strategies of deduction: A) choosing a listed constraint and considering which lines could have that constraint, and B) choosing a line in the grid and considering which constraints it could have. I really wanted to make a solve path which needed both at different points. As Simon discovered, strategy B was needed for the break-in; eliminating possibilities for the lines in boxes 4, 6 and 8. But strategy A was needed a while later for deducing that the long line was the palindrome (because even though this long line could have been other things, it was the only one left that could be the palindrome.) This is one of the things I was most pleased about with this puzzle. I was delighted that all my favourite parts along the solve path were picked up on and mentioned, and that he touched on the two different strategies. Was especially satisfying watching him try strategy B at the beginning and then switch to strategy A which was much more useful... I was eagerly awaiting the moment he would turn his attention to the renban and the thermometer :) A possibly interesting fact is that this is actually version 2 of the puzzle. I finished version 1 a month beforehand and was so pleased with it, only to discover to my dismay (a lot later) an error I'd made with the German Whisper line logic which meant that the line couldn't be filled in in the way I'd wanted, which ruined the flow from that point onwards. I then spent another week trying to fix this, whilst also desperately trying to retain about 12 other pieces of logic which I loved. This was so tricky, a massive puzzle in itself... I tried so many different layouts of the German Whisper line in box 4, and it kept on having knock on effects that ruined one of my favourite pieces of logic somewhere else. In the end though I managed it... and now even though the basic layout of the lines in the grid is very similar to V1 and the logical step-by-step path is almost identical, the actual finished grid in terms of digits is very different. For example, in version 1 the renban line had the digits 2-9, the palindrome had a 1 at both ends, and the parity line was odd digits. Also there was no 3 in the corner! Version 1 looked a tiny bit cleaner aesthetically and looked a bit more like a face. In this second version I had to make the thermometer wiggle a bit more which made the mouth look weird haha. Oh well, at the end of the day I was much more concerned with logic than aesthetics for this puzzle. Thanks so much Simon for a great video. I particularly enjoyed some bonus logical deductions from you at the beginning, based on hypothetical scenarios that turned out to be incorrect, but still were very interesting to hear about nonetheless :)
I love reading how you went about creating this - fascinating! I always enjoy hearing from the constructors how they came up with their ingenious ideas!
THANK YOU for returning to the former order of doing the announcements first, then the rules, and then start cracking! It's just the best order. Great thing to see you go back to this.
I had broken the puzzle before even starting because I made an assumption based on the rules wording - i ruled out the thermo being 9 cells because it would by necessity be a renban as well, and the rules say each line appears once.
That made my day when he said that haha. It's fun when something odd and abstract exists only in your head for 6 weeks until someone else acknowledges it and says it out loud on RUclips 😃
Really appreciate to be able to skip the announcements, they really make the videos better but most of the time they aren’t relevant for me. Thank for awesome content
I very much enjoy this format with a brief overview of the rules at the start, then the announcements and then the in-depth rules which lead directly to the solve, it feels more organic and I think you really nailed the flow of the video this way
Just a note that Simon's 5 in box 7 is still residual from his incorrect scanning. However, the parity line gets determined by having 357 in the row and column, forcing the line to be even and putting a 2 in row 8. From there the solve is identical, but logically sound
Rules: 05:58 Let's Get Cracking: 10:31 Simon's time: 37m38s Puzzle Solved: 48:09 What about this video's Top Tier Simarkisms?! Bobbins: 3x (12:09, 17:01, 40:24) Three In the Corner: 3x (40:24, 40:31, 44:54) The Secret: 2x (13:01, 23:00) And how about this video's Simarkisms?! Ah: 12x (25:32, 26:00, 26:14, 27:22, 31:07, 32:01, 36:03, 37:15, 37:30, 37:57, 45:06, 47:07) Hang On: 8x (12:25, 17:23, 22:20, 28:17, 32:29, 34:32, 46:27, 46:33) By Sudoku: 6x (26:12, 29:30, 34:10, 34:22, 34:24, 39:35) Sorry: 3x (23:53, 31:44, 46:02) Stuck: 3x (04:28, 04:48, 34:21) Lovely: 3x (32:07, 43:15, 47:29) In Fact: 3x (08:47, 18:15, 20:03) Fabulous: 3x (03:38, 03:41, 08:38) Good Grief: 2x (15:02, 46:46) What on Earth: 2x (35:33, 47:05) Naughty: 2x (47:16, 49:06) Beautiful: 2x (30:18, 44:38) Apologies: 1x (07:56) The Answer is: 1x (13:13) Obviously: 1x (11:12) Wrogn: 1x (03:51) Let's Take Stock: 1x (35:05) Most popular number(>9), digit and colour this video: Thirteen (11 mentions) One (83 mentions) Green (14 mentions) Antithesis Battles: High (4) - Low (2) Even (13) - Odd (5) Lower (4) - Higher (1) Lowest (2) - Highest (1) Row (9) - Column (5) FAQ: Q1: You missed something! A1: That could very well be the case! Human speech can be hard to understand for computers like me! Point out the ones that I missed and maybe I'll learn! Q2: Can you do this for another channel? A2: I've been thinking about that and wrote some code to make that possible. Let me know which channel you think would be a good fit!
23:11 finish. I started out by labelling each line with what it could be. This led to the same logic as Simon, but it was a little quicker for me to see the elimination of choices versus identifying options as I went along.
Yes this is the most efficient way to solve this puzzle. Simon realised this after a little while. He also had a good intuition of which lines would be the most restricted and therefore the best places to focus on, so he never got round to fully having to label every line at the beginning.
SPOILER Just a note! You can deduce the top right line is not parity earlier by noting it must be odd (5 cells in box 3) and it cannot have a 3 on it. I love solving the puzzle and then watching Simon to see how our logic lines up. Still haven’t beaten him cause I’m so bad at the actual sudoku 😭. Thank you so much for the hours of entertainment!!
You're right. i'm glad Simon found it the other way though, which is the same way I had thought about it... having one cell with three even options next to a cell with three odd options
I have so much sympathy for the bad pencil marks in box 7. Can't tell you the number of times I've been stumped by what turns out to be bad pencil marks.
Same! I nearly scuffed this exact puzzle because I saw an out-of-date pencil mark in one of the columns and thought, “oh, the blank cell must complete the pair” when I’d already completed the pair and the marked box ought to have been filled in already
Ingenious set of rules and a wonderful explanation of how to figure out which line was which type. Thanks, Simon! (And I do prefer the rules right before the puzzle ... hopefully people who only want the puzzle will just skip to the thing they are interested in.)
Thanks Emily, your comments always make me smile almost as much as you in your picture. I agree about preferring the instructions right before the puzzle solve
Amazed to have beat Simon's time! (only by a couple of minutes) Wonderful puzzle, coloring in the options for lines helped me find the double (regionsum-palindrome) and triple (thermo-renban-whisper) much earlier. Well done Marty!
I usually solve the puzzle before looking at the video (spoilers, see?). And this has to be one of the best puzzles I have ever solved! Every step is a simple and logical progression from the previous one, and each step is directly visible without any complex looking ahead or mental contortions. It is just a matter of looking in the right place to see the deduction. Giant thumbs up for this one! It's only a shame I can only do it once 😞
Ahh thankyou so much for these kind words. Here I made the sort of puzzle that I knew I would find most fun if I was solving it myself. I'm really happy you found the path smooth and well signposted. I always knew and intended that the tricky bit would be finding the break-in. As you say, it's just a matter of looking in the right place, which requires some systematic investigating at the beginning. It's quite straighforward and not too difficult after that. But I definitely feel that sometimes a puzzle can still be really satisfying, fun and smooth without being difficult :)
Am I the only one seeing that placing 5 in r7c2 was based on the wrong "245" scanning in column 2 and was never rolled back? It's just lucky it led to the right solution, but the actual logic should go backwards, back from the parity line in box 9. r7c9 has 67 options but you can't put 7 in it since you won't have 2 odd digits for r8c8-r8c9, so it has to be an even parity line.
I thought I'd remembered having to do something a bit more complicated with that parity line. That was it. For it to be an odd parity line, it would need two 7s. Makes a run of two videos where Simon got just a little lucky. I wonder if that's a record.
Was nice to see Simon use letters too, I shamelessly Goodliffed in 7 letters on the top left of each line to represent each type of rule and removed all the obvious ones first, I rarely get to do a puzzle without interruption so reminders help a lot.
75 minutes, though I think I had the timer running for a bit while not actually at my PC. A very neat puzzle. I liked how you could use tuples logic to narrow down what the lines could be. And the way that the polarity logic actually managed to escape box 4 through the palindrome was brilliant, especially because it was also box 4 that provided the other constraint of 4 and 5 being taken in row 6 that made it impossible for box 6 to contain a thermo!
Thanks so much, really happy you liked it - I was pretty proud of the way these elements tied together so it’s nice when other people say they appreciated some of these specifics
You know it's a great puzzle when you're just curious to understand the rules and they end up drawing you in until the puzzle is completed. Real fun one!
This was a big flaw that made me unable to really start - I thought the 9 cell thermo couldn't exist based on "each of the seven line types listed below appears once in the grid". Under this strict interpretation I think the puzzle is broken
Wanted to pass on this one, since it took Simon 49 minutes. But what an intriguing rule set. It took me 68:54, but I cracked it. What an enjoyable puzzle. Fantastic.
18:12 + ~5:00 for my time with a restart when I realized I mistakenly counted one of the lines wrong and got into a no solution situation early on, then noted that Simon pointed out in the first minute or two how I miscounted. 😅 Trying again with that knowledge allowed me to quickly move my way through the puzzle. Really interesting one, props to Marty Sears!
A nice hour solve for me. I nearly made a mistake that would have led to me running into a contradiction and probably putting down the puzzle for a while - a result of accidentally trusting myself to have up-to-date pencil marks - but luckily I caught it immediately. My favorite part of this puzzle was the beginning, where I had to think of the various types a line could be the way I think of pencil marks in a square. I figured that was how I’d have to approach it, but it was still fascinating to see how it all fell out, especially when the lines got pinned down one by one. Also, and this goes without saying, congrats to Ding Liren.
This is the type of puzzle I love, with wonderful interplay between the different rule sets. I have to say , the three in the corner joke got old many months ago ..........
I got stuck several times and made a couple mistakes that required backtracking, but I did finish in 88:49, and I'm pleased enough with that! It was an enjoyable hour and a half.
We came up with something different for parity and it gave us a different, but equally correct, solution. Fun puzzle, the logic broke my brain to begin with, terrific stuff!
Do you mean you came up with a different interpretation of the parity rule? There's a unique solution that follows the rules as intended, and I'm not sure how else you can interpret the parity line rule - odd or even defines a digits parity.
@@RichSmith77 Yes. We spent quite some time thinking about which parity was intended - odd/even or high/low. We went with high/low in the end and got a different but valid solution that fit all the criteria as we interpreted them.
Jolly one, thanks. I just had to mark all the lines with all 7 possibilities and then whittle them down until I got the RGT triple because I knew I'd never keep track of everything otherwise.
I solved this one a few days ago, it was a lot of fun!! I think I struggled a little bit with the first couple lines, but after that it became more or less approachable.
Brilliant puzzle. Best approach is to fill in all letter options on every line and start eliminating (it's very difficult to track options in one's head). This way you quickly get the letter triple that Simon found - which are quite easy to resolve. After that it's pretty much the path Simon found. The obsession with looking for 3 in the corner and being made to do Sudoku in a Sudoku puzzle are getting very cliched.
Thanks Dave :) Yes that was very much the intended approach, but I realised that some people might not think of doing it like that straight away. For the record, any 3s in the corner of my puzzles are purely by coincidence - I am never paying a second thought to that whilst setting lol
33 minutes for me. Lovely puzzle. Having a timestamp for the rules which are immediately before the puzzle is best, imho. But if you have chapters that we can skip to I don't really mind what order they come in!
At 35:30, I don't understand why the middle right line couldn't be a thermometre. Going up from 1. He simply said it couldn't be a 5, but didn't explain why. Couldn't it be starting from the bottom, 1,2,3,4,5...?
Hi Tomatodamashi :) the 5 on the German Whisper and the 5 in the middle, means the 5 in the middle-right box must be on the top row of that box (so somewhere in the top 3 cells of that line.) However, if this line was a thermometer, the 5 would be too near to the end of the line… regardless of which way the thermometer is going, you could have a maximum of four digits either side of the 5 (either 1234 or 6789)… but here there are at least five cells on the southern end of the line beneath the 5… this is too many to fill with either 1234 or 6789. So this can’t be the thermometer. Hope this helps?
I started this puzzle and then quit. I paused the video and poseted this after the line in the bottom middle got eliminated as the Unlucky Line. But that's exactly the line I thought it would be. Because it says "Adjacent along the line". Not every square in that line is adjacent to eachother, and the diagonal part of the line isn't adjacent. A lot of other lines were eliminated because they had 3 squares in a row and that means they can't become 13 on both ends. In that box there are 3 parts of the line that have adjacent squares. One part leaves the middle box, which means it can have a duplicate number as another. No other line works for this rule. The only other line I was sure of was the Regional one was the longest line where every part of it had to sum up to 9. I'm also pretty sure the Palindrome was the line to the left of the 5. My first language isn't english, so I didn't understand the Parity line rule. But now I see that it can be a maximum of 5 digits if it's contained in the same box. Which eliminates the left and right lines. Which means that if I'm right about the other lines it can only be the one in the top right or the short one. However after a second thought it eliminates the top right since the long one has to be a 9. It only works if the sum of the long line is an 8 instead.
At 45:08 you filled 5 in box 7 assuming column 2 had 245 left to fill so that 5 could have been wrong. Was that 5 filled in by some other logic that wasn't broken by the fact that 4 was already filled in column 2?
Yes Simon got a bit lucky there in the end... actually this 5-7-2 triple in this box would be resolved a short time later by the parity line. Solving the parity line should have been a bit more tricky because there'd be a 2-7 in R8C2, meaning the 2 couldn't immediately be forced onto the parity line... this would mean you'd have to consider the possibility of the parity line being odd too. With a bit more consideration you can notice that the only odd digit that could go in R7C9 is a 7, but then it's impossible to fill the rest of the line in. So it must be even, the parity line can be filled in, which then resolves the 5-7-4. Well spotted :)
@@martysears I worked it out by checking that if R7C2 was 7 you could fill the rest of the digits in box 7 and in row 7, 6 would be on parity line because there is already a 5 in column 9 which means parity line is even but then in row 8 you need to fill 1,7&8 and since two of them has to be on parity line it is not possible and the 7 can't be in R7C2. But I have seen that Simon doesn't fill a number if two choices are possible and goes back to the other choice if something breaks. He solves by logic only and I thought maybe there was some logic that I missed. This method of filling a number and going back if something breaks feels kinda wrong but sometimes that's the only way I can do it. The fact that Simon never does this always impressed me.
Great one, not often I beat both the video time and the actual solve time. However, Simon of course would beat me if he did not have to describe all steps. But I'm really happy with 25 minutes. I colored all lines giving each line type a colour. That ment I found the pair in boxes 6 and 8, so I highlighted everything else and removed the pair colours. And suddenly the german whispers in box 4 just turned up and from that one it was pretty straight forward. Really fun puzzle, my type of logic. :)
To put something interesting at the start of the video, to entice first time viewers to keep watching, rather than have them stop watching after five minutes of announcements, birthdays and the always exciting "man reads a list of names". I prefer the rules immediately before the solve too. I'll even, sometimes, sit through the first couple of minutes of general community chat before skipping to the rules, when done this way too.
Fantastic puzzle. Kind of challenging to pencil mark the line types, but after that it went very well. Made some boo-boos along the way but it all worked out in the end :) I love this channel by the way.
Hehe it's a great channel isn't it? I fully expected colour flashes to be used for the line options, but the letters worked well enough. Glad you like it and fixed the boo-boos :)
@@martysears didn’t even occur to me to use letters. Used purple for renban, green for whisper, etc. but keeping track of the associations needed pen and paper at one point. Letters would have sped things along.
26 Minutes for me. I realised Immediately that the Lines in Boxes 4, 6 and 8 Could not be Parity, Palindromes, Unlucky or Region Sum,. (Therefore you Can assert these are the other lines). Therefore they Had to be Whispers , Thermos or Remban, So found the whisper in Box 4 Very Quickly.
What i don't understand is why a region sums line was eliminated as a possibility for the lines that were contained in a single box (like box 4). I know that it essentially has no meaning in that case, but it still seems valid to me to have a null region sums line. Especially on a puzzle like this where deducing which is which is the point. But that threw me off.
Yes I would have liked to have had that allowed, and it was in version 1 of the puzzle. But when I had to change the german whisper line to all be in one box, it would have ruined the break-in if that could also have been a region sum line
I could not figure out what was wrong with my solve. Tried 3 times to the same GRT triple, but forgot the thermo direction wasnt set. Gave up and watched, fun puzzle, frustrating mistake on my part
Unlucky line turned out to the be the key for me and a lucky discovery when I was just about to give up and turned on the video to listen to the rules again… I was trying to solve it thinking that all the digits on the line must add up to more than 13 and after almost an hour I thought I just can’t do it. When I realized what it actually means I managed to solve the whole thing in 30min, phew😄
Hi Patrik, yes technically a 9-cell thermometer follows the rules of a Renban line as well, but the one in box 6 is THE renban line because it can't be anything else, and the one in box 8 has to be one of the other named lines. Which has to be the thermometer, but just so happens to contain all consecutive digits too
@@patrikeriksson9033 The rules don't actually say *only* once. They just say they appear once. That could mean at least once. Also, just because the digits on a line obey the rules of a line, does not mean that that line has to be one of that type. The line in box 8 needs to be a thermometer line, so that there is one. Just because the digits on it obey the rules for a renban line doesn't mean it is a renban.
@@RichSmith77 Im sorry, but I do not buy that explanation. It read Once, not atleast once. For me that means that there is only one line that is allowed to be a renban line. If it whould read twice I whould assumed there is only twice. There is a reason when the black/white dots are used that it clearly states all black dots are given/not all black dots are given.
This puzzle is BROKEN. There are 2 Renban lines. When the rules say there is ONE instance of each line type, and one can determine that the line in boxes 7&8 is at least a renban before knowing if it's a thermometer, that forces the line in boxes 6&9 to be a thermometer, which is BROKEN by the 5 in r6c7-9. At that point, one has to either restart/backtrack (and arrive at the same broken point again) or else forge ahead with the assumption that the rules are wrong.
Apologies, I have to admit that I didn’t expect people to interpret the rules that way - my testers didn’t, and I felt it would be clear that each line is one of those named lines with the specified rule, and if it happens to fulfil a different rule too then that’s just incidental, and acceptable. Like, in my head, the thermometer isn’t ‘the renban line’ (even though it technically follows renban rules) because it’s the thermometer, and nothing else can be the thermometer. Each line only has one name, and I felt that was implied by the rules. But a few other people have mentioned the same thing as you and said they interpreted it how you did, so I’m sorry if it led to frustrations
@@martysears @Marty Sears I appreciate that. You can just remove the word "once" because it is meaningless in that sentence unless its inclusion is intended to specify a restriction. I'm curious about something different: Simon's deduction at 31:13 didn't occur to me but it would have saved me a lot of time later on. Was that deduction expected at that point or was that Simon at his cleverest?
@@grithog5399 I didn’t intend it in the way he did it, in terms of relating those two palindrome cells to the german whisper polarity. This wasn’t entirely necessary though, as a little while later the German Whisper can be pencil marked and those two palindrome cells can be narrowed down anyway. Always interesting to see where Simon’s mind goes though!
I failed at this one through not reading the rules… somehow I assumed the unlucky line was a 13-based version of the tens line (can be broken into groups of cells which sum to exactly 13)
Simon: That's a three... and stops that from being a three in the corner, bobbins! Me: Yesss!!! And we still manage to get a three in the corner. Kinda says something about the probability of a three ending up in the corner, doesn't it!
because theoretically digits could repeat on the parity line if it spanned several boxes. It would only be impossible if more than 5 cells see eachother in a row, column or box, for example the line in the bottom middle box. This is ruled out from being a parity line, not because it has more than 5 cells, but because it has more than 5 cells in the same box. At the start, all lines could have been the parity line except for the three restricted ones that ended up being renban, thermometer and German Whisper.
I cruised through the first half but got stuck, retracked a few times and kept getting the exact same problem, finally realised I had eliminated the second 4 from the palindrome line thinking it must be something different as I already had a 4 on the line 🤦
Interesting.. But, you're making me remember something. "What's My Line" was a television show in the 50s. (A famous show - all in their tuxes and dresses - "Kitty Carlyle" being one of the 4 panelists ) And seen all the way into the 70s. (Blk/wht, btw) They all derived from "What's My Line," though. [That "book" you were talking about was a Play (by the same person) was in 1980. [The "Play" being in 1974 or something - then the book after] They all derived from "What's My Line" though. Interesting, again.
I just realized, they got the "Anyway" from where you're saying ("Whose Life Is It Anyway?") But they got "Line" from "What's My Line?" (Not, "Life," as you think) It became apparent "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" was partially British owned after that English guy replaced Drew Carry -- I guess Drew Carry had other commitments, being the host of "Let's Make A Deal" shortly thereafter. But they got "Anyway" from one show - and "Line" from "What's My Line?" It was a combo, in other words. Cheers
I somehow caught about the Chess game because someone retweeted it. It feels like a Pokémon competition, where it's more the mental stress of making so many plays than the winning or losing.
Did I miss something? Near the start, simon ruled our a line being a 'polarity line' because 456 (that had to to have a five) would not be on opposite 'poles' . This was after the german whispers lines was deduced. Where is the rules about 'polarity lines? It might not have made a difference, but you can't use rules that don't exist to solve a sudoku..
The rule was about parity lines, where all digits on the line are even, or all digits on the line are odd. Because it needed a 5 and one of 4 or 6 it couldn't be the parity line.
I think he used “polarity” to refer to the high vs low digits on a German whispers. A better term may be magnitude. You didn’t include the time stamp where Simon said that, so I’m not sure if that is what you were referring to or not.
Timestamp? I've re-watched a good chunk of the video (on x2 speed) and, sorry, I cannot find a point where Simon rules out a 'polarity line'. I hear him rule out a parity line at 32:00, because 5(46) cannot all be the same parity. But nothing about a polarity line.
Simon: Re: the chess championship. Please announce your spoilers and give us opportunity to switch to the next chapter in the video before talking about it. Thanks.
Brilliant! What a cracking idea. I started by assigning letters to each line type, and marking each line with the types it could be. Palindrome, sums, parity, and unlucky could only be on the lines touching the first three rows and the 3-cell line. Therefore the whispers, thermo, and renban had to be on the remaining three lines. The given 5 meant that the whisper could only be the line in box 4, pushing 5 and 46 onto the other line in the box. This prevented that line being the palindrome, so the long line was the palindrome. By sudoku, 5 had to go on the line in box 6 in R4, which ruled this out from being the thermo, therefore this was the renban, and the line in box 8 was the thermo. After some sudoku, R1C5/6 could only be at most a 67 pair, which meant it couldn't be the equal sum line, and so the equal sum line was the one starting in R3C4, and the sum had to be 9. This resolved the thermo and whisper lines and most of the palindrome. It wasn't possible to put 3 on the line in the top right, so it couldn't be the parity, so it had to be the unlucky line, starting with two 67 pairs. The digit in R2C9 could only be 5, next to 89 in that order. The parity line had two possible solutions, one odd, and one even, but sudoku put paid to the odd one. The rest was sudoku. Apart from deducing the groups of lines slightly differently, my solve was very similar to yours, which probably means the path is forced. I do wish you'd stop going on about 3 in the corner, it's puerile and quite tedious. If it happens, happy day, but concentrate on the puzzle until then please.
Dear Simon, are there actually any constructors left lately who dare to submit a puzzle to the channel without a 3 in the corner? I start to think not ;-)
Haha the truth is that this 3 was entirely incidental and not planned. I haven't done the maths but the chances of randomly having a 3 in one of the four corners has got to be pretty high? My gut instinct wants to guess it's around 35%...
Dang, I made an early mistake, and though I was able to get far into the puzzle, I wound up making it unsolvable because the parity was wrong. EDIT: Tried again from the start and got it in 28:01.
That's very true! So many of these variant sudoku elements have high-low symmetry and so need disambiguating somehow. This is why a puzzle with just German Whisper lines or just white kropki dots will always need something else to differentiate high from low... either a given digit, black kropki dot or an inequality sign. In this case though, the region sum line served the purpose nicely without having to add in something extra on top of the 7 lines
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I think reading the rules after the announcements but with chapters for who wanna skip is the best solution. Keep up the good work CtC
Although there's still the problem of new viewers wandering away during the 6 minutes before the video is actually about the puzzle.
Are new viewers really going to make the effort to find and click on a chapter mark before they know whether the video will actually interest them? I seriously doubt it.
Chapters are helpful to those of us who already know we want to watch (most of) the video, but they don't really address the channel-growth problem that was the reason for tinkering with the format in the first place.
Maybe a brief standard remark about the start that the rules will be read out loud after the announcements have been made, is a good solution to that problem.
@@steve470 I think you may have a point about new viewers. But it does depend on what they are looking for. CtC has such a reputation that it might not matter; they might discover the chapters right off the bat and skip to what they are interested in; they might be intrigued by all of the personal stuff at the beginning and discover that CtC is more than just a "how to solve variant sudoku" channel ... I think that the actual thing, as I recall, that the tweaks were attempting to address was whether YT would recommend a CtC video after someone who watched something else. Sticking with the video would also be part of it, I am sure.
I think the best compromise is to have the rule set on the intro, but he doesn't read the rules until after the announcement. That way viewers can read the rules ahead of time while he's thanking patrons
I would also like it if they would move all the repetition and cliches to the beginning, like the secret, the tricks of a German whisper, the perimeter of a yin-yang, all that jazz.
Wooo 🎉 Was so happy this evening to discover that this had been featured. I checked it after noticing a sudden surge of people playing the puzzle on Logic Masters Germany this evening and wondering why. Of all the puzzles I've submitted to Cracking the Cryptic, this is my favourite and was the one I most had my fingers crossed for that it would be chosen to appear.
I had such fun making this after thinking of the initial idea (and the title!)
I started off by playing round with lines and seeing how they affected eachother, and I soon realised that a given 5 in the middle could serve a few different purposes.
I wanted to have a line that nobody would have seen before, and came up with the idea of the unlucky line when trying to think of another type of line that would need to have particular digits left off of it.
I knew I wanted each line at the start to have at least two options it could be, and for the break-in to be discovering a pair of lines that both had the same two options. Simon called it an RT pair on line types, which was very similar to in my walkthrough document where I mentioned it was a bit like a meta X-wing on line types. This one idea really pleased me, and then I wanted the break-in to be a third line which had these two options plus a 3rd. And once the meta x-wing is discovered, this 3rd option becomes forced.
Simon explored both strategies of deduction: A) choosing a listed constraint and considering which lines could have that constraint, and B) choosing a line in the grid and considering which constraints it could have. I really wanted to make a solve path which needed both at different points. As Simon discovered, strategy B was needed for the break-in; eliminating possibilities for the lines in boxes 4, 6 and 8. But strategy A was needed a while later for deducing that the long line was the palindrome (because even though this long line could have been other things, it was the only one left that could be the palindrome.) This is one of the things I was most pleased about with this puzzle.
I was delighted that all my favourite parts along the solve path were picked up on and mentioned, and that he touched on the two different strategies. Was especially satisfying watching him try strategy B at the beginning and then switch to strategy A which was much more useful... I was eagerly awaiting the moment he would turn his attention to the renban and the thermometer :)
A possibly interesting fact is that this is actually version 2 of the puzzle. I finished version 1 a month beforehand and was so pleased with it, only to discover to my dismay (a lot later) an error I'd made with the German Whisper line logic which meant that the line couldn't be filled in in the way I'd wanted, which ruined the flow from that point onwards.
I then spent another week trying to fix this, whilst also desperately trying to retain about 12 other pieces of logic which I loved. This was so tricky, a massive puzzle in itself... I tried so many different layouts of the German Whisper line in box 4, and it kept on having knock on effects that ruined one of my favourite pieces of logic somewhere else. In the end though I managed it... and now even though the basic layout of the lines in the grid is very similar to V1 and the logical step-by-step path is almost identical, the actual finished grid in terms of digits is very different. For example, in version 1 the renban line had the digits 2-9, the palindrome had a 1 at both ends, and the parity line was odd digits. Also there was no 3 in the corner!
Version 1 looked a tiny bit cleaner aesthetically and looked a bit more like a face. In this second version I had to make the thermometer wiggle a bit more which made the mouth look weird haha. Oh well, at the end of the day I was much more concerned with logic than aesthetics for this puzzle.
Thanks so much Simon for a great video. I particularly enjoyed some bonus logical deductions from you at the beginning, based on hypothetical scenarios that turned out to be incorrect, but still were very interesting to hear about nonetheless :)
Fantastic puzzle, Marty. 37 minutes and 47 seconds of pure enjoyment in solving this excellent idea for a sudoku. As Simon likes to say: "Take a bow".
Very nice puzzle -- I loved the "meta-X-wing" concept.
Fantastic Puzzle. I also beat Simons time. Which is Very Rare for me. But im really happy i managed it.
I love reading how you went about creating this - fascinating! I always enjoy hearing from the constructors how they came up with their ingenious ideas!
Thank you so much Marty is providing insights as to how you went about this!! Fabulous setting from you.
THANK YOU for returning to the former order of doing the announcements first, then the rules, and then start cracking! It's just the best order. Great thing to see you go back to this.
I had broken the puzzle before even starting because I made an assumption based on the rules wording - i ruled out the thermo being 9 cells because it would by necessity be a renban as well, and the rules say each line appears once.
Bless whoever programmed confetti forr threes in the corner! That's been one of my favorite Simon bits for a long time
That would be Sven, he does some amazing work!
"I now have an RT pair in lines" Once again, a statement that I never imagined could be used to describe Sudoku.
Very nicely done.
That made my day when he said that haha. It's fun when something odd and abstract exists only in your head for 6 weeks until someone else acknowledges it and says it out loud on RUclips 😃
Really appreciate to be able to skip the announcements, they really make the videos better but most of the time they aren’t relevant for me. Thank for awesome content
I very much enjoy this format with a brief overview of the rules at the start, then the announcements and then the in-depth rules which lead directly to the solve, it feels more organic and I think you really nailed the flow of the video this way
Just a note that Simon's 5 in box 7 is still residual from his incorrect scanning. However, the parity line gets determined by having 357 in the row and column, forcing the line to be even and putting a 2 in row 8. From there the solve is identical, but logically sound
You got to love that the break in for finding the lines is a pseudo-Sodoku move
🤓
#pseudoku
42:28. Great puzzle, love when the ruleset takes you right to the end, without a boring cleanup phase.
I agree! I always like to try and make sure that the novelty ruleset still has some part to play right near the end, at least a little bit
Rules: 05:58
Let's Get Cracking: 10:31
Simon's time: 37m38s
Puzzle Solved: 48:09
What about this video's Top Tier Simarkisms?!
Bobbins: 3x (12:09, 17:01, 40:24)
Three In the Corner: 3x (40:24, 40:31, 44:54)
The Secret: 2x (13:01, 23:00)
And how about this video's Simarkisms?!
Ah: 12x (25:32, 26:00, 26:14, 27:22, 31:07, 32:01, 36:03, 37:15, 37:30, 37:57, 45:06, 47:07)
Hang On: 8x (12:25, 17:23, 22:20, 28:17, 32:29, 34:32, 46:27, 46:33)
By Sudoku: 6x (26:12, 29:30, 34:10, 34:22, 34:24, 39:35)
Sorry: 3x (23:53, 31:44, 46:02)
Stuck: 3x (04:28, 04:48, 34:21)
Lovely: 3x (32:07, 43:15, 47:29)
In Fact: 3x (08:47, 18:15, 20:03)
Fabulous: 3x (03:38, 03:41, 08:38)
Good Grief: 2x (15:02, 46:46)
What on Earth: 2x (35:33, 47:05)
Naughty: 2x (47:16, 49:06)
Beautiful: 2x (30:18, 44:38)
Apologies: 1x (07:56)
The Answer is: 1x (13:13)
Obviously: 1x (11:12)
Wrogn: 1x (03:51)
Let's Take Stock: 1x (35:05)
Most popular number(>9), digit and colour this video:
Thirteen (11 mentions)
One (83 mentions)
Green (14 mentions)
Antithesis Battles:
High (4) - Low (2)
Even (13) - Odd (5)
Lower (4) - Higher (1)
Lowest (2) - Highest (1)
Row (9) - Column (5)
FAQ:
Q1: You missed something!
A1: That could very well be the case! Human speech can be hard to understand for computers like me! Point out the ones that I missed and maybe I'll learn!
Q2: Can you do this for another channel?
A2: I've been thinking about that and wrote some code to make that possible. Let me know which channel you think would be a good fit!
may I suggest the addition of "bahumbug" to the simarkisms? simon has started to use it quite often
after working on this for a couple hours and many mistakes, i have finally solved this puzzle, such a fun challenge!
23:11 finish. I started out by labelling each line with what it could be. This led to the same logic as Simon, but it was a little quicker for me to see the elimination of choices versus identifying options as I went along.
Yes this is the most efficient way to solve this puzzle. Simon realised this after a little while. He also had a good intuition of which lines would be the most restricted and therefore the best places to focus on, so he never got round to fully having to label every line at the beginning.
SPOILER
Just a note! You can deduce the top right line is not parity earlier by noting it must be odd (5 cells in box 3) and it cannot have a 3 on it. I love solving the puzzle and then watching Simon to see how our logic lines up. Still haven’t beaten him cause I’m so bad at the actual sudoku 😭. Thank you so much for the hours of entertainment!!
You're right. i'm glad Simon found it the other way though, which is the same way I had thought about it... having one cell with three even options next to a cell with three odd options
I have so much sympathy for the bad pencil marks in box 7. Can't tell you the number of times I've been stumped by what turns out to be bad pencil marks.
Same! I nearly scuffed this exact puzzle because I saw an out-of-date pencil mark in one of the columns and thought, “oh, the blank cell must complete the pair” when I’d already completed the pair and the marked box ought to have been filled in already
That's my favourite mistake to make 😀
Ingenious set of rules and a wonderful explanation of how to figure out which line was which type. Thanks, Simon! (And I do prefer the rules right before the puzzle ... hopefully people who only want the puzzle will just skip to the thing they are interested in.)
Thanks Emily, your comments always make me smile almost as much as you in your picture. I agree about preferring the instructions right before the puzzle solve
Amazed to have beat Simon's time! (only by a couple of minutes) Wonderful puzzle, coloring in the options for lines helped me find the double (regionsum-palindrome) and triple (thermo-renban-whisper) much earlier. Well done Marty!
I usually solve the puzzle before looking at the video (spoilers, see?). And this has to be one of the best puzzles I have ever solved! Every step is a simple and logical progression from the previous one, and each step is directly visible without any complex looking ahead or mental contortions. It is just a matter of looking in the right place to see the deduction. Giant thumbs up for this one! It's only a shame I can only do it once 😞
Ahh thankyou so much for these kind words. Here I made the sort of puzzle that I knew I would find most fun if I was solving it myself. I'm really happy you found the path smooth and well signposted. I always knew and intended that the tricky bit would be finding the break-in. As you say, it's just a matter of looking in the right place, which requires some systematic investigating at the beginning. It's quite straighforward and not too difficult after that. But I definitely feel that sometimes a puzzle can still be really satisfying, fun and smooth without being difficult :)
Wow, just going through the rules and this one seems fun already. Thank you for all that you do on the channel and to all that contribute.
Am I the only one seeing that placing 5 in r7c2 was based on the wrong "245" scanning in column 2 and was never rolled back? It's just lucky it led to the right solution, but the actual logic should go backwards, back from the parity line in box 9. r7c9 has 67 options but you can't put 7 in it since you won't have 2 odd digits for r8c8-r8c9, so it has to be an even parity line.
I believe you are right. c2r789 should have been 57/27/25, not 5/7/2, at that point….
I thought I'd remembered having to do something a bit more complicated with that parity line. That was it. For it to be an odd parity line, it would need two 7s.
Makes a run of two videos where Simon got just a little lucky. I wonder if that's a record.
Was nice to see Simon use letters too, I shamelessly Goodliffed in 7 letters on the top left of each line to represent each type of rule and removed all the obvious ones first, I rarely get to do a puzzle without interruption so reminders help a lot.
75 minutes, though I think I had the timer running for a bit while not actually at my PC. A very neat puzzle. I liked how you could use tuples logic to narrow down what the lines could be. And the way that the polarity logic actually managed to escape box 4 through the palindrome was brilliant, especially because it was also box 4 that provided the other constraint of 4 and 5 being taken in row 6 that made it impossible for box 6 to contain a thermo!
Thanks so much, really happy you liked it - I was pretty proud of the way these elements tied together so it’s nice when other people say they appreciated some of these specifics
You know it's a great puzzle when you're just curious to understand the rules and they end up drawing you in until the puzzle is completed. Real fun one!
Love that :D thanks, glad you enjoyed it
There is a flaw in the puzzle: there is 2 renban line as the 9 cell thermometer is also a renban line.
This was a big flaw that made me unable to really start - I thought the 9 cell thermo couldn't exist based on "each of the seven line types listed below appears once in the grid". Under this strict interpretation I think the puzzle is broken
Same reason I couldn't start properly. Simple fix is to write "at least" before once in the ruleset
Wanted to pass on this one, since it took Simon 49 minutes. But what an intriguing rule set. It took me 68:54, but I cracked it. What an enjoyable puzzle. Fantastic.
omg I did it. It was one of those puzzles I thought "Well, I'll take a peek and see if I can spot a break-in" and then it kept going.
That's cooool. My favourite videos on here are the ones with sneaky break-ins
28:22 ... I love these sort of 'logical deduction' sudokus!
Wonderful puzzle!
Me too, I will definitely be making more of these sorts of puzzles. Thanks for the nice comment :)
This is the coolest, most fun, most awesome puzzle ever and I LOVE LOVE LOVED it!!!
😀 ah thanks Crystal, I’m really happy you liked it so much
18:12 + ~5:00 for my time with a restart when I realized I mistakenly counted one of the lines wrong and got into a no solution situation early on, then noted that Simon pointed out in the first minute or two how I miscounted. 😅 Trying again with that knowledge allowed me to quickly move my way through the puzzle. Really interesting one, props to Marty Sears!
Thank you, props much appreciated :)
Wonderful puzzle, had a lot of fun solving it!
A nice hour solve for me. I nearly made a mistake that would have led to me running into a contradiction and probably putting down the puzzle for a while - a result of accidentally trusting myself to have up-to-date pencil marks - but luckily I caught it immediately. My favorite part of this puzzle was the beginning, where I had to think of the various types a line could be the way I think of pencil marks in a square. I figured that was how I’d have to approach it, but it was still fascinating to see how it all fell out, especially when the lines got pinned down one by one.
Also, and this goes without saying, congrats to Ding Liren.
34:31 "Why did I got 5 in here ?" is one of the funniest realisations ever.
This is the type of puzzle I love, with wonderful interplay between the different rule sets. I have to say , the three in the corner joke got old many months ago ..........
I got stuck several times and made a couple mistakes that required backtracking, but I did finish in 88:49, and I'm pleased enough with that! It was an enjoyable hour and a half.
When reading the rules someone might not know what “parity” means, so it might be good to clarify that.
I agree with you Simon: I prefer having the rules after the announcements.
37:36 for me! A super fun puzzle, this one, thank you for festuring it
We came up with something different for parity and it gave us a different, but equally correct, solution. Fun puzzle, the logic broke my brain to begin with, terrific stuff!
Do you mean you came up with a different interpretation of the parity rule?
There's a unique solution that follows the rules as intended, and I'm not sure how else you can interpret the parity line rule - odd or even defines a digits parity.
@@RichSmith77 Yes. We spent quite some time thinking about which parity was intended - odd/even or high/low. We went with high/low in the end and got a different but valid solution that fit all the criteria as we interpreted them.
46:37 The two errors were not independent - the 24 mistake directly resulted from the 78 mistake via box logic
And still keeping the ill-earned 5 afterwards.
Jolly one, thanks. I just had to mark all the lines with all 7 possibilities and then whittle them down until I got the RGT triple because I knew I'd never keep track of everything otherwise.
I had this idea for construction some times ago, I'm happy to see it's possible and someone else had the same idea
I solved this one a few days ago, it was a lot of fun!! I think I struggled a little bit with the first couple lines, but after that it became more or less approachable.
Brilliant puzzle. Best approach is to fill in all letter options on every line and start eliminating (it's very difficult to track options in one's head). This way you quickly get the letter triple that Simon found - which are quite easy to resolve. After that it's pretty much the path Simon found. The obsession with looking for 3 in the corner and being made to do Sudoku in a Sudoku puzzle are getting very cliched.
Thanks Dave :) Yes that was very much the intended approach, but I realised that some people might not think of doing it like that straight away. For the record, any 3s in the corner of my puzzles are purely by coincidence - I am never paying a second thought to that whilst setting lol
33 minutes for me. Lovely puzzle.
Having a timestamp for the rules which are immediately before the puzzle is best, imho. But if you have chapters that we can skip to I don't really mind what order they come in!
The lines in boxes 4,6,8 can only be renban/german whispers/thermo
I think you're onto something ;)
Just over an hour. Pretty cool idea for a puzzle.
At 35:30, I don't understand why the middle right line couldn't be a thermometre. Going up from 1. He simply said it couldn't be a 5, but didn't explain why. Couldn't it be starting from the bottom, 1,2,3,4,5...?
Hi Tomatodamashi :) the 5 on the German Whisper and the 5 in the middle, means the 5 in the middle-right box must be on the top row of that box (so somewhere in the top 3 cells of that line.) However, if this line was a thermometer, the 5 would be too near to the end of the line… regardless of which way the thermometer is going, you could have a maximum of four digits either side of the 5 (either 1234 or 6789)… but here there are at least five cells on the southern end of the line beneath the 5… this is too many to fill with either 1234 or 6789. So this can’t be the thermometer. Hope this helps?
I started this puzzle and then quit. I paused the video and poseted this after the line in the bottom middle got eliminated as the Unlucky Line. But that's exactly the line I thought it would be. Because it says "Adjacent along the line". Not every square in that line is adjacent to eachother, and the diagonal part of the line isn't adjacent. A lot of other lines were eliminated because they had 3 squares in a row and that means they can't become 13 on both ends. In that box there are 3 parts of the line that have adjacent squares. One part leaves the middle box, which means it can have a duplicate number as another. No other line works for this rule. The only other line I was sure of was the Regional one was the longest line where every part of it had to sum up to 9. I'm also pretty sure the Palindrome was the line to the left of the 5.
My first language isn't english, so I didn't understand the Parity line rule. But now I see that it can be a maximum of 5 digits if it's contained in the same box. Which eliminates the left and right lines. Which means that if I'm right about the other lines it can only be the one in the top right or the short one. However after a second thought it eliminates the top right since the long one has to be a 9. It only works if the sum of the long line is an 8 instead.
This looks like fun! 😊
Thanks for reminding me of a great show once I used to watch. Time to return to it. Who solves sudoku puzzles anyway? :D
37:50 for me. Marvelous puzzle!
Fantastic puzzle
I completely read the rules bad. I was Thinking the unlucky line always had to sum to 13 and not at least 13. I got stuck for an hour because of that
At 45:08 you filled 5 in box 7 assuming column 2 had 245 left to fill so that 5 could have been wrong. Was that 5 filled in by some other logic that wasn't broken by the fact that 4 was already filled in column 2?
Yes Simon got a bit lucky there in the end... actually this 5-7-2 triple in this box would be resolved a short time later by the parity line. Solving the parity line should have been a bit more tricky because there'd be a 2-7 in R8C2, meaning the 2 couldn't immediately be forced onto the parity line... this would mean you'd have to consider the possibility of the parity line being odd too. With a bit more consideration you can notice that the only odd digit that could go in R7C9 is a 7, but then it's impossible to fill the rest of the line in. So it must be even, the parity line can be filled in, which then resolves the 5-7-4. Well spotted :)
@@martysears I worked it out by checking that if R7C2 was 7 you could fill the rest of the digits in box 7 and in row 7, 6 would be on parity line because there is already a 5 in column 9 which means parity line is even but then in row 8 you need to fill 1,7&8 and since two of them has to be on parity line it is not possible and the 7 can't be in R7C2.
But I have seen that Simon doesn't fill a number if two choices are possible and goes back to the other choice if something breaks. He solves by logic only and I thought maybe there was some logic that I missed. This method of filling a number and going back if something breaks feels kinda wrong but sometimes that's the only way I can do it. The fact that Simon never does this always impressed me.
That was a lot more straightforward than I was expecting, I thought it was going to be pretty tricky.
Where does he find the puzzles? I want to try some on my own using Sven’s app but I don’t know how to
Great one, not often I beat both the video time and the actual solve time. However, Simon of course would beat me if he did not have to describe all steps. But I'm really happy with 25 minutes. I colored all lines giving each line type a colour. That ment I found the pair in boxes 6 and 8, so I highlighted everything else and removed the pair colours. And suddenly the german whispers in box 4 just turned up and from that one it was pretty straight forward.
Really fun puzzle, my type of logic. :)
Thanks Jens, glad you liked it. I fully expected Simon to colour the lines too haha
Seriously good puzzle
I really prefer having the rules before the solving instead of having the announcements in between. What was the idea behind changing it?
To put something interesting at the start of the video, to entice first time viewers to keep watching, rather than have them stop watching after five minutes of announcements, birthdays and the always exciting "man reads a list of names".
I prefer the rules immediately before the solve too. I'll even, sometimes, sit through the first couple of minutes of general community chat before skipping to the rules, when done this way too.
Beautiful puzzle and not nearly as difficult as I thought at first.
Fantastic puzzle. Kind of challenging to pencil mark the line types, but after that it went very well. Made some boo-boos along the way but it all worked out in the end :) I love this channel by the way.
Hehe it's a great channel isn't it? I fully expected colour flashes to be used for the line options, but the letters worked well enough. Glad you like it and fixed the boo-boos :)
@@martysears didn’t even occur to me to use letters. Used purple for renban, green for whisper, etc. but keeping track of the associations needed pen and paper at one point. Letters would have sped things along.
26 Minutes for me.
I realised Immediately that the Lines in Boxes 4, 6 and 8 Could not be Parity, Palindromes, Unlucky or Region Sum,. (Therefore you Can assert these are the other lines).
Therefore they Had to be Whispers , Thermos or Remban, So found the whisper in Box 4 Very Quickly.
What i don't understand is why a region sums line was eliminated as a possibility for the lines that were contained in a single box (like box 4). I know that it essentially has no meaning in that case, but it still seems valid to me to have a null region sums line. Especially on a puzzle like this where deducing which is which is the point. But that threw me off.
Yes I would have liked to have had that allowed, and it was in version 1 of the puzzle. But when I had to change the german whisper line to all be in one box, it would have ruined the break-in if that could also have been a region sum line
I could not figure out what was wrong with my solve. Tried 3 times to the same GRT triple, but forgot the thermo direction wasnt set. Gave up and watched, fun puzzle, frustrating mistake on my part
Unlucky line turned out to the be the key for me and a lucky discovery when I was just about to give up and turned on the video to listen to the rules again… I was trying to solve it thinking that all the digits on the line must add up to more than 13 and after almost an hour I thought I just can’t do it. When I realized what it actually means I managed to solve the whole thing in 30min, phew😄
Clive would love this 😂 as would Drew and Aisha
Isent the bottom middle line both a thermometer and a renban line? I thought they could only appear once.
Hi Patrik, yes technically a 9-cell thermometer follows the rules of a Renban line as well, but the one in box 6 is THE renban line because it can't be anything else, and the one in box 8 has to be one of the other named lines. Which has to be the thermometer, but just so happens to contain all consecutive digits too
@@martysears I do understand that. But now we have 2 renban lines and we are now breaking the rule. I used it as a negative constraint.
@@patrikeriksson9033 The rules don't actually say *only* once. They just say they appear once. That could mean at least once.
Also, just because the digits on a line obey the rules of a line, does not mean that that line has to be one of that type. The line in box 8 needs to be a thermometer line, so that there is one. Just because the digits on it obey the rules for a renban line doesn't mean it is a renban.
@@RichSmith77 Im sorry, but I do not buy that explanation. It read Once, not atleast once. For me that means that there is only one line that is allowed to be a renban line.
If it whould read twice I whould assumed there is only twice. There is a reason when the black/white dots are used that it clearly states all black dots are given/not all black dots are given.
This puzzle is BROKEN. There are 2 Renban lines. When the rules say there is ONE instance of each line type, and one can determine that the line in boxes 7&8 is at least a renban before knowing if it's a thermometer, that forces the line in boxes 6&9 to be a thermometer, which is BROKEN by the 5 in r6c7-9. At that point, one has to either restart/backtrack (and arrive at the same broken point again) or else forge ahead with the assumption that the rules are wrong.
Apologies, I have to admit that I didn’t expect people to interpret the rules that way - my testers didn’t, and I felt it would be clear that each line is one of those named lines with the specified rule, and if it happens to fulfil a different rule too then that’s just incidental, and acceptable. Like, in my head, the thermometer isn’t ‘the renban line’ (even though it technically follows renban rules) because it’s the thermometer, and nothing else can be the thermometer. Each line only has one name, and I felt that was implied by the rules. But a few other people have mentioned the same thing as you and said they interpreted it how you did, so I’m sorry if it led to frustrations
@@martysears @Marty Sears I appreciate that. You can just remove the word "once" because it is meaningless in that sentence unless its inclusion is intended to specify a restriction.
I'm curious about something different: Simon's deduction at 31:13 didn't occur to me but it would have saved me a lot of time later on. Was that deduction expected at that point or was that Simon at his cleverest?
@@grithog5399 I didn’t intend it in the way he did it, in terms of relating those two palindrome cells to the german whisper polarity. This wasn’t entirely necessary though, as a little while later the German Whisper can be pencil marked and those two palindrome cells can be narrowed down anyway. Always interesting to see where Simon’s mind goes though!
I failed at this one through not reading the rules… somehow I assumed the unlucky line was a 13-based version of the tens line (can be broken into groups of cells which sum to exactly 13)
Not a bad idea for a puzzle, that ;)
26:37 for me. good one.
Simon: That's a three... and stops that from being a three in the corner, bobbins!
Me: Yesss!!!
And we still manage to get a three in the corner. Kinda says something about the probability of a three ending up in the corner, doesn't it!
I managed to do this one :). It seemed so impossible at first
How can any line more than a length of 5 be a parity line. the line of 3 in box 9 had to be the parity line from the start.
because theoretically digits could repeat on the parity line if it spanned several boxes. It would only be impossible if more than 5 cells see eachother in a row, column or box, for example the line in the bottom middle box. This is ruled out from being a parity line, not because it has more than 5 cells, but because it has more than 5 cells in the same box. At the start, all lines could have been the parity line except for the three restricted ones that ended up being renban, thermometer and German Whisper.
Solved in 23:48
I cruised through the first half but got stuck, retracked a few times and kept getting the exact same problem, finally realised I had eliminated the second 4 from the palindrome line thinking it must be something different as I already had a 4 on the line 🤦
It's a double pun! The name of the comedy show "Whose Line is it Anyway?" is a pun on the name of the book, "Whose _Life_ is it Anyway?".
Interesting..
But, you're making me remember something.
"What's My Line" was a television show in the 50s.
(A famous show - all in their tuxes and dresses - "Kitty Carlyle" being one of the 4 panelists )
And seen all the way into the 70s.
(Blk/wht, btw)
They all derived from "What's My Line," though.
[That "book" you were talking about was a Play (by the same person) was in 1980.
[The "Play" being in 1974 or something - then the book after]
They all derived from "What's My Line" though.
Interesting, again.
In other words;
"Whose Line Is It, anyway?" was a take off of "What's My Line?"
[Your Play or Book fits in-between]
So, I agree with Simon.
"Which Line Is It, anyway?" was a take off of "Whose Line Is It, anyway?" (
Jivvi, interesting, though.
Nice.
I just realized, they got the "Anyway" from where you're saying ("Whose Life Is It Anyway?")
But they got "Line" from "What's My Line?" (Not, "Life," as you think)
It became apparent "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" was partially British owned after that English guy replaced Drew Carry -- I guess Drew Carry had other commitments, being the host of "Let's Make A Deal" shortly thereafter.
But they got "Anyway" from one show - and "Line" from "What's My Line?"
It was a combo, in other words.
Cheers
I found 4 lines in an hour but I'm giving up now, I have no clue how to sort out the last three
I somehow caught about the Chess game because someone retweeted it. It feels like a Pokémon competition, where it's more the mental stress of making so many plays than the winning or losing.
Nice puzzle, 227 minutes ;)
Did I miss something? Near the start, simon ruled our a line being a 'polarity line' because 456 (that had to to have a five) would not be on opposite 'poles' . This was after the german whispers lines was deduced. Where is the rules about 'polarity lines? It might not have made a difference, but you can't use rules that don't exist to solve a sudoku..
The rule was about parity lines, where all digits on the line are even, or all digits on the line are odd. Because it needed a 5 and one of 4 or 6 it couldn't be the parity line.
I think he used “polarity” to refer to the high vs low digits on a German whispers. A better term may be magnitude. You didn’t include the time stamp where Simon said that, so I’m not sure if that is what you were referring to or not.
Timestamp?
I've re-watched a good chunk of the video (on x2 speed) and, sorry, I cannot find a point where Simon rules out a 'polarity line'. I hear him rule out a parity line at 32:00, because 5(46) cannot all be the same parity. But nothing about a polarity line.
Simon: Re: the chess championship. Please announce your spoilers and give us opportunity to switch to the next chapter in the video before talking about it. Thanks.
You started to mark which each line could be and then stop. Why not finish marking ever line and what it could be?
Brilliant! What a cracking idea.
I started by assigning letters to each line type, and marking each line with the types it could be. Palindrome, sums, parity, and unlucky could only be on the lines touching the first three rows and the 3-cell line. Therefore the whispers, thermo, and renban had to be on the remaining three lines. The given 5 meant that the whisper could only be the line in box 4, pushing 5 and 46 onto the other line in the box. This prevented that line being the palindrome, so the long line was the palindrome. By sudoku, 5 had to go on the line in box 6 in R4, which ruled this out from being the thermo, therefore this was the renban, and the line in box 8 was the thermo. After some sudoku, R1C5/6 could only be at most a 67 pair, which meant it couldn't be the equal sum line, and so the equal sum line was the one starting in R3C4, and the sum had to be 9. This resolved the thermo and whisper lines and most of the palindrome. It wasn't possible to put 3 on the line in the top right, so it couldn't be the parity, so it had to be the unlucky line, starting with two 67 pairs. The digit in R2C9 could only be 5, next to 89 in that order. The parity line had two possible solutions, one odd, and one even, but sudoku put paid to the odd one. The rest was sudoku.
Apart from deducing the groups of lines slightly differently, my solve was very similar to yours, which probably means the path is forced.
I do wish you'd stop going on about 3 in the corner, it's puerile and quite tedious. If it happens, happy day, but concentrate on the puzzle until then please.
I wish there was also a modular line included. LOL.
Maybe I'll make a sequel at some point with some of the other lines that didn't get a look-in in this one :)
@@martysears Yes please!!! I loved this puzzle!
@@martysears I would love to see how this can develop into a fog puzzle.
F for the modular line that didn't make it into the puzzle
Am I the only one annoyed by this unending quest for 3`s in the corner?
THE CAT!!!
Dear Simon, are there actually any constructors left lately who dare to submit a puzzle to the channel without a 3 in the corner? I start to think not ;-)
Haha the truth is that this 3 was entirely incidental and not planned. I haven't done the maths but the chances of randomly having a 3 in one of the four corners has got to be pretty high? My gut instinct wants to guess it's around 35%...
Dang, I made an early mistake, and though I was able to get far into the puzzle, I wound up making it unsolvable because the parity was wrong.
EDIT: Tried again from the start and got it in 28:01.
I can already see that without the same sum line, the puzzle will have at least 2 different solutions.
That's very true! So many of these variant sudoku elements have high-low symmetry and so need disambiguating somehow. This is why a puzzle with just German Whisper lines or just white kropki dots will always need something else to differentiate high from low... either a given digit, black kropki dot or an inequality sign. In this case though, the region sum line served the purpose nicely without having to add in something extra on top of the 7 lines
At a closer look, I also see that the unlucky line can do it as it usually requires high numbers.
Waiting for the sequel: Would I Line to You
Well OF COURSE it’s a spoof on a British TV series. I had to google it since UK cultural literacy is not one of my strong suits!
The match between Ian and Ding was very enjoyable to watch indeed. The ending was ... epic, gg Ding.
13 seconds after upload. New record for me 🙂
I wanna be first to solve, not first to post a comment.
Whenever I hear about someone defending their thesis, I always think of this comedy skit: ruclips.net/video/Lrlro3YJ15o/видео.html
23 minutes
Am I really the first?
Sorry, most vids are very good but you spend ages explaining the obvious then make enormous leaps into some of the more difficult parts.