Sometimes I wonder if Simon and I could be an elite solving sudoku pair. He would do 99% of the solving, and occasionally I would remind him of something he said earlier in the solve.
That was basically the dynamic between him and Mark when they solved a puzzle together. Simon would make a deduction, pencilmark a part of the grid, then he’d find something interesting in another part of the grid, but Mark would say “No, don’t move on yet. There’s still more you can do here”
That's an old hiking tip, that is. Carry a Sudoku book in your backpack. If you get lost, just sit down on the nearest tree stump and start solving a puzzle. Someone is bound to appear and tell you "Four in box 3 has got to be in row 2, so that's a six" or something, and you can ask them for help .....
Thank you for doing one of my puzzles once again. I was hoping you do this puzzle because I thought it had some really unique ideas with cages and fog which weren't used before. And it seemed you liked the puzzle very much. So thanks again and take care, really satisfied how you solved the puzzle.
I’ve done a few of these FOW puzzles and this by far has been my favourite, and probably the hardest. The simple constraint that the cage total is in the top row creates an elegant break in, aided and abetted by one cleared empty cell. Genius!
Sooooo many colors! Once you uncovered most of the cages, clean up those colors and get rid of all the flashes. Once you get rid of the fog and can see most of the cages, undo the colors and then just color individual cells. Makes it so much easier to see things. Great puzzle
In fog puzzles, it can be a huge help to use the line tool to draw a line through cells that form part of a cage, rather than colouring, because it allows you to see more easily where the fog remains. It also frees up colouring for pairing up matching cells (top tip: use a white flash on all coloured cells and then it is obvious whether it is still fogged up or not). But the *absolute* top tip for colouring in *any* puzzle is to REMOVE THE COLOURING WHEN YOU NO LONGER NEED IT.
Yes, I was going to post that very thing-remove the coloring when it's no longer needed. It then clears the clutter, as well as being able to use that color again if needed. But, in all my watching here, for many years, I think Simon really likes colors, even to the degree that he will fully color the grid as opposed to removing it. And he will use as many colors as he can, where I will use as few. Recently I've been using the circle feature of the pen tool to indicate that certain digits are the same. But that gets too complicated if a lot of cells need to be identified, or two cells would need a circle.
What I love about this puzzle is that the last piece of fog revealed is the total of the first cage, which made me feel that I have completed a whole journey of fog revealing.
I think so. But also one of the 4 cells is still in the fog. So it could have been a given digit anyway, even though that would look a bit odd in this puzzle.
I can give you a piece of advise: remove colors once you don't need them. For example, you could remove pink, orange at the moment the entire strip was revealed or light green once you got '4' in there and have corresponding labeling
37:47 Uniqueness does not apply because the red digit can't repeat in the cage 51:20 Actually, what I was screaming about is that green can't repeat in the blue cage
Great puzzle, and great solve by Simon as always! Really enjoyed it, but needed a little reminder from Simon's video as I got stuck on the 18 cage: Cages never go upwards above the cell with the cage total. One of those tiny rules, just like king/knights move, that I often forget about in the middle of my solves.
35:30 This is a very helpful (and beautiful) deduction, and would have uniquely answered most of his subsequently asked questions 😊 If only he had written it down! Oh well, you can’t be perfect in live solves, he does a pretty excellent job and I have improved my solving massively thanks to these videos ☺️ Thanks Simon 😊
Made great progress until halfway through the puzzle and then it came to a grinding halt a few times but soldiered through them. ~146 minutes to solve. Definitely deserves the higher difficulty ranking.
The shading to track digits feels like magic. I was impressed I was able to use it to solve the back half of the puzzle after I saw Simon do it on the front half with the 7/8 3/9 pairs.
I so enjoy watching every day! I would like to kindly suggest using the line tool and/or the letters more. I thought you could have used the line tool to outline the cages so you could just use colors for the digits. Still loved it and love to you and Mark this Holiday season! ❤
Or, you know, delete unnecessary cage colouring (e.g. the yellow and pink here) to allow those colours to be repurposed. But the line tool would be a good choice too.
I finished in 46 minutes. This has got to be one of the wildest break-ins I have done. Seeing that the cage had to wrap around to the top, forcing the 30 cage to be 6789 was spectacular. Even better, I managed to beat Simon's time by quite a lot, which always feels good. It seems like this innocuous ruleset of a cage have to have the total in the leftmost portion of the uppermost part is incredibly powerful, which is kind of funny. Great Puzzle!
68 minutes! Wooohoo! This was such a pleasant journey through very exact clues, with barely any leeway in the solving path. Great experience! I loved the coloring of the 78 in the middle of the solve, I had to overengineer my coloring too ahaha!
Simon rarely to never deletes colors that are not needed, and it hurts to watch. Once I got to the bottom 3 boxes, I deleted all my coloring and started over. Assign individual colors to each cell in row 7. Then row 8 and 9 get mostly colored in due to the interactions with the 45 cage and the 43 cage. 7-8 pairs and 3-9 pairs appear, box 4 gets colored, and on and on. It's the true secret that Simon may not know. In any row, column, or box, you can assign each cell an individual, specific color.
@@stephenbeck7222 Yes, that is a big pitfall of using uniqueness in variant puzzles is that there can be ways to disambiguate the digits that aren't immediately obvious.
51:24 for me. Kicking myself watching Simon's solve, because I left the 1 and 2 in box 4 unresolved for a shocking amount of time! This was a lovely puzzle that didn't let up in difficulty all the way to the end. I really enjoyed needing to juggle the demands of building cages in the fog, tracing digits around the grid with colours, and basic arithmetic on killer cages (of which the last was by far the hardest for me!)
11:49 Think Simon made it harder on himself than needed here, you can very clearly see that there is not a cage corner at the bottom right of r5c3 (if you're not about that, compare the bottom left corner of the same cell, where the inside corner of the cage is clearly visible), so you can also yellow r6c4 which gives the maximum and thus exact extent of the 21 cage
This is what I did, but it seems like really squinting for a few pixels on my phone, I was wondering if there was an easier hit of logic that I was missing.
I used that too, but I do prefer to not rely on those little tiny things unless I have to, so I prefer Simon's route, which was in my view prettier, and not actually all that more complicated.
If only he stopped selecting and deselecting all the cells he was thinking about at this point, he might have seen it. Don’t know whether it’s part of the intended solve path, since you need sharp eyes to see it 😊
This was a really fascinating puzzle. I can perhaps offer a bit of insight into Simon's question of whether finding the 1 in box 4 would circumvent the logic he used in box 5. I will say I found that 1 earlier, but the box 5 went largely in the same fashion - identify the cells on the centre white dot as 789, identify that 89 would not be possible due to box 5's 1, note that the upper-left cell of box 5 could not be from 789 due to seeing all three flavours of 789 in the 45 cage, and the only thing that differed in my logic was that rather than finding the 9 immediately, I had the top row of box 5 marked as 2345 (cell 1 for the aforementioned reason, and cells 2-3 because a higher digit on them would put four digits from 789 in the row), and got 9 in cell 8 from that. So in short, maybe there was another approach also, but placing that box four 1 earlier doesn't really mess with the logic used to solve box 5 for me. The rest of the puzzle for me boiled down to colouring 789's, some significant Goodliffeing in box 8, very tediously eliminating one candidate from one cell every few minutes or so, and then finally arriving at a way to identify a 9 in c3r4, which put a 78 pair into the bottom 45 cage. I didn't go hunting for 3's, but I think the 78's were what mattered, so in practice my path didn't really differ from Simon's much, other than that he's much faster than me lol. An aside: I think (perhaps fortunately) that the uniqueness argument Simon mentioned for resolving the 78 pair would not actually have even been true. The 7 or 8 in cell c1r6 would see the bottom-left corner of the deadly pattern, and fix one of the two orientations as correct. Of course, it didn't end up being a 78 x-wing, and there was a proper logical way through it anyway, but perhaps it's assuaging to know that there truly wasn't (as far as I could spot) a true uniqueness argument to be had there.
Here’s a vote that you’re the sane one! Very much enjoy the oasis of calm in this lovely community! Particularly on a gloomy, grey day, when not feeling great and watching with my fluffy blanket and hot chocolate!
Save some hot chocolate for me my friend!! Grey, gloomy days aren't fun at all. Rain up by me all day today also. But nothing like a Simon solve to get us thru it. Hope you are feeling better. 🩵💙
I used the pen tool for tracking cages, left more options for coloring 789s. Actually, I think the only digits I didn’t end up assigning a color were 45s.
I'm strangely charmed by puzzles like this which require logic based on what are, essentially, typographic and layout conventions. I'll bet whoever first standardized where the total goes in killer cages never dreamed of the perverse uses to which it would someday be put. 😊
@@Orangeremi aaah! I got stuck here for a while, this was exactly the hint I needed to keep going :) have put the video back on pause whilst I continue, cheers!
Wooot i finished this one in 76:08 Great Puzzle, i got stuck and found some hidden gem to get on time after time after time! Thank you Dorlir and Simon, now to watch how Simon did the puzzle!
At 20:01, how can we be certain that the 18sum cage in box5 dips vertically down into a 2 and 1? Can it not go upward into a 2 and then move right into box6 as 1? I can't understand how Simon is so certain
Simon was so close to making progress at 28:50. If he'd only gone on to ask himself where the green digit went in box 8 (I know, making him do sudoku in a sudoku), he would have seen that none of the possible positions allowed it to be a 2, and that green was therefore 4.
solved in 45:30. the middle section of this puzzle is so incredibly robust, in order to make progress I had to whittle down options for pencil marks until I forced a pair to resolve r9c5. up to that portion of the puzzle things were flying by in solving, and after that find things then broke open and the rest of the puzzle flew by too.
The turned out to be a lot more straightforward than I thought at first sight. It was spoilt by a typo that revealed something I shouldn't have seen until later. Typos are a HUGE downside of these foggy puzzles. One slip of the keys, and you never feel as good about what you are achieving after that.
It might be solved with a built-in timer (1second should be enough)? So basically nothing happens for about 0,5-1,0 seconds, after filling a cell with digits. Another solution could be, that cells within the fog only allow a notation first, before entering the correct digit, which requires a bit more action from the user, and this could also be confusing. Less stressful, if users can toggle these options on/off, if they consider themselves people who have no patience and/or trust their keyboard skills.
@@Yttria How can you unlearn what you've seen? I try to carry on still looking for a logical route to a solution, but that is always easier to spot with the added information you have.
Once again it's fascinating how Simon finds rather convoluted ways to prove things that could be very easily be proven in a different way :D He's absolutely amazing at it and way better than I'll ever be but still it's very funny to me.
37:27 You can't even use uniqueness at this point as R6C1 would resolve the pattern in case the dot was 7-8, i.e it would only be a deadly pattern in case R6C1 is also part of a 7-8 deadly pattern which in turn would be resolved by R3C4. So both R3C4 and R6C1 would both have to be part of a deadly 7-8 patterns in order for the dot to be it as well, which is very unlikely.
41:05 finish. It took me a few minutes to spot the logic for what Simon labelled as the red cells, but other than that it was quite smooth flowing. Excellent puzzle!
16:25 - Anyone know why blue and orange couldn't be the same cage? Why can't a cage touch itself orthogonally, I've never heard that as a Killer Sudoku rule before.
I solved this one on my own(though I did use the error checker and spotted a mistake I made). The 789 conundrum was an absolute beast. Simon used colors. I deleted all the 78&9s and switched to pencil marking with A B C to represent the digits I knew had to be the same after banging my head against it for about 45 minutes.
48:00 Simon: "I thought my brain had cottoned on to something a few minutes ago, but I think I led myself astray." Ron Howard: "He had." Simon: "And that's very annoying." Ron Howard: "It was." 51:00 Simon: "and you've been shouting at me, with justification, for ages...." Ron Howard: "Actually, no one had even noticed this bit of logic, which was as brilliant as it was arcane. They'd been shouting about the 9 in the bottom left cage." 53:15 Simon: "Oh, no, I've got it again. This is appalling. I've just spotted something else that was completely obvious." Ron Howard: "It really wasn't." Simon: "I deserve to be shouted at." Ron Howard: "But sure." Ron Howard: "On the next Cracking the Cryptic... Simon switches from colors to the letter tool." Simon: "♫That's B in the corner♫"/"♫That's C in the corner♫"/"♫That's D in the corner♫"/"♫That's E in the corner♫"/"♫That's G in the corner♫" Ron Howard: "And Mark pencils a 123456789 nonuple. Which turns out to be the break-in."
At 51:19, Simon is right that we're shouting at him, but wrong about the reason. We're shouting because the bottom-left cage already has both flavours of 78 in it, so _both_ of the 3789s in box 7 reduce to 39.
And finished a little differently from mine - I saw things I didn't quite see in my original solve (twas ever thus) - great solve, Simon. And that hard middle step is a bit unexpected - I suspect we may see some more fog puzzles which are not just fog-based logic but have interludes like this one.
I'm not understanding the logic @20:50. Why can't the cell 2 cells above the 23 pair also be 23? Why can't the 18 cage curve upwards instead of downwards? I solved it up to the point, and even had more information but couldn't deduce why the cage must curve down. I had the upper white dot pair marked as either a 2 or 4 paired with a 3 for the longest time, but had already found the 5 to the left.
I could not see why R6C6 is either 2 or 3. Couldn't the 8-cage go upwards with a 2 or 3 in R4C6? Quite a hard fog of war puzzle from the sudoku perspective, whereas the cages were not that hard to find. Great solution anyway!!
When Simon waxes on about if only he could eliminate the 9 im lower left of box 8, he could make all these deductions, and then he eliminates that 9 and ignores all those deductions
solved it in 132 minutes. the 7/8 problem at box 7 did break my head though. Couldn't find the logic steps you took and played out all possible solutions about it in my head until it finally broke :D
I am a Portuguese fan and i relly love this kind of puzzles. I this puzzle i have a doubt. Can you clarify me? I can't understand why in minute 20:30 this below values doesn' work r: 4 c: 6 can't be a 2 r: 3 c: 6 can't be a 1 r:4 c: 5 can't be a 3 the 18 sum cage can't go up... I really love watch you solving puzzles, but i need to understand it :D Sorry about my english ;)
Want simon to pick one such video where he got stuck for a "premiere" Where he could see live if people were actually shouting at him while watching... (Spoiler - most of us are just hoping and praying and feeling very proud of ourselves for catching something you missed.. No anger- just love ❤)
The key to determining why one cell is the upper most left cell of a cage hinges on word order, go up and THEN left. This confused me for quite a while
I'm glad Simon didn't use uniqueness since it would have been wrong. The cage from the left goes well into the foggy area and could have decided even a 78 pair.
Is it bad to use uniqueness? At 38:00 he says there's a 78 deadly pattern, but he won't use uniqueness. In this particular example, one cell is part of a cage, so it would not be a deadly pattern, but it sounded like a "cheaty" use of logic.
I'm missing something: why couldn't 2/3 also be a possibility also going up just before 22:37? If 2/3 is a possibility going up then you couldn't put that 9 in box 5.
Why can't the 30 cage be connected to the cage abutting it? (aside from it not being so in the solution) Simon's logic seems to skip over the possibility that the 30 cage loops back on itself in a non-standard cage formation where adjacent cells may or may not be separated by a cage wall. If there is a particular cage rule that limits this, it would be nice to explain in the future.
@@iambicpentakillI think Lauren's point is that it assumes you're familiar with the non-stated rule that cages do not bend back on themselves, i.e. they don't have walls separating two cells in the same cage, in a U-turn for example. It's a fair point. If you have lots of experience with cages in variant Sudokus, then you likely just take that for granted. But there isn't anything in the rules that state cages behave this way, or even that "standard cage construction rules apply".
Even if you forget that cages don't bend back on themselves (as I did), it's still not very hard to prove that the 30 cage can't be connected to the cage on the other side of the white dot. The shortest possible distance connecting those 2 partial cages that are visible right at the start is 8 cells. And an 8 cell cage must have a total of at least 36, thus they must be separate cages. It wasn't until I was watching Simon later and wondering why he didn't bother proving that, that I realised that the visible cage boundaries are enough 🤦
@@jesscarrier4180 This makes sense now, and I was making a simple mistake. I was miscalculating the box and assuming it could simply leave a 5 out, but that's obviously wrong since the box would need to be 40. Maybe I need to stop skipping over the explanations of the secret in the next few videos.
I was stuck in this puzzle a while, and I still don't understand how you deduce that the 18 cage around 21:00 has to go down? it can also go up towards the white dot. You state that the cell below the 78 pair has to be a 2or3. but it technically doesn't, only if the cage goes down, which it does not need to do. I really don't get how to proceed from here...
Cage totals always go in the highest, leftmost caged cell. So if the cage went up, the corner total would not be in the cell its marked in. Its the same logic he used in the beginning to determine that the green (later blue) cage in box1 must go into row 1, since the leftmost cell in row 2 _is not marked with the cage total_
Have people made more variations on the fog of war? I remember one was "dense fog" where it only reveals the square itself. You could make one where you have to see around corners, or where the revealed squares are halfway across the board...
Sorry but on the 18 cage in the middle saying the cage goes down without considering it could go up as either 3, or 2 with the 1 in box 2 or 6 seems to be guessing.
@37:50 -- There is no obvious uniqueness issue here. The alleged deadly pattern would be disambiguated by one of its cells being "the red digit" and us being able to determine the value of another "red digit" elsewhere in the grid at some point.
Me: green is in the cage so you can place green in Box 7, and do a LOT of other stuff than. Simon: I'm stuck. Me: desperately trying to shout back in time to him. Simon: still stuck. I really have to work on my time bending capabilities... 😅😂
Sometimes I wonder if Simon and I could be an elite solving sudoku pair. He would do 99% of the solving, and occasionally I would remind him of something he said earlier in the solve.
👏
That was basically the dynamic between him and Mark when they solved a puzzle together.
Simon would make a deduction, pencilmark a part of the grid, then he’d find something interesting in another part of the grid, but Mark would say “No, don’t move on yet. There’s still more you can do here”
I’ve thought the same about myself.
Or tell him to look at his pencil marks.
That's an old hiking tip, that is. Carry a Sudoku book in your backpack. If you get lost, just sit down on the nearest tree stump and start solving a puzzle. Someone is bound to appear and tell you "Four in box 3 has got to be in row 2, so that's a six" or something, and you can ask them for help .....
@@bluerizlagirl Redford and Nolte could've used that trick in "A Walk in the Woods". Clever idea.
Thank you for doing one of my puzzles once again. I was hoping you do this puzzle because I thought it had some really unique ideas with cages and fog which weren't used before. And it seemed you liked the puzzle very much. So thanks again and take care, really satisfied how you solved the puzzle.
I’ve done a few of these FOW puzzles and this by far has been my favourite, and probably the hardest. The simple constraint that the cage total is in the top row creates an elegant break in, aided and abetted by one cleared empty cell. Genius!
I totally agree that this channel truly is is "an oasis of calm in a strange world"! 🧘♂
Amen!
Yes, indeed!
Sooooo many colors! Once you uncovered most of the cages, clean up those colors and get rid of all the flashes. Once you get rid of the fog and can see most of the cages, undo the colors and then just color individual cells. Makes it so much easier to see things. Great puzzle
I love the fact that Simon uses parity and cage logic to prove things which simple Sudoku could prove! Every time!
In fog puzzles, it can be a huge help to use the line tool to draw a line through cells that form part of a cage, rather than colouring, because it allows you to see more easily where the fog remains. It also frees up colouring for pairing up matching cells (top tip: use a white flash on all coloured cells and then it is obvious whether it is still fogged up or not). But the *absolute* top tip for colouring in *any* puzzle is to REMOVE THE COLOURING WHEN YOU NO LONGER NEED IT.
Yes, I was going to post that very thing-remove the coloring when it's no longer needed. It then clears the clutter, as well as being able to use that color again if needed. But, in all my watching here, for many years, I think Simon really likes colors, even to the degree that he will fully color the grid as opposed to removing it. And he will use as many colors as he can, where I will use as few.
Recently I've been using the circle feature of the pen tool to indicate that certain digits are the same. But that gets too complicated if a lot of cells need to be identified, or two cells would need a circle.
What I love about this puzzle is that the last piece of fog revealed is the total of the first cage, which made me feel that I have completed a whole journey of fog revealing.
True, but for everyone who knows the secret, that cage total is no surprise anymore 😊
Yes, that was really nice. Simon didn't notice it, of course.
It's very gratifying to watch Simon get stuck and flounder at exactly the same point in the puzzle where I got stuck and floundered.
Is Simon's dismissed used of uniqueness at 38:20 incorrect because of the blue 43 cage?
I think so. But also one of the 4 cells is still in the fog. So it could have been a given digit anyway, even though that would look a bit odd in this puzzle.
He dismissed uniqueness, because if the puzzle had two solutions, he would prove that.
@@bobh6728 The point is that it wasn't available in the first place. It could have been disambiguated by the blue box
At that point, the 78 cell in r6c1 (the one he eventually colours black) has to be somewhere in row 9 in box 9 - so the white dot can't be a 78 pair.
I can give you a piece of advise: remove colors once you don't need them. For example, you could remove pink, orange at the moment the entire strip was revealed or light green once you got '4' in there and have corresponding labeling
19:58 Why could the 18 cage not go up and right to create a 4-cell cage with 2 in r4c6 and 1 in r4c7 (forcing a 3 in r4c5)?
U forgot the rule. Cage cell with clue must always at the uppermost row of the cage
10 minutes in: This puzzle seems approachable. How did it get 4 stars?
30 minutes in: Oh...
37:47 Uniqueness does not apply because the red digit can't repeat in the cage
51:20 Actually, what I was screaming about is that green can't repeat in the blue cage
32:45 what a cryptic explanation for the 2 in R7C2 ! Much simpler to ask "where is the 2 in box 8 ?
WOW! What a fantastic puzzle. My favourite fog of war so far and, most challenging yet. Loved it.
I always feel better about giving up halfway through a puzzl when Simon gets stuck at the same spot for 20 minutes.
Great puzzle, and great solve by Simon as always!
Really enjoyed it, but needed a little reminder from Simon's video as I got stuck on the 18 cage: Cages never go upwards above the cell with the cage total. One of those tiny rules, just like king/knights move, that I often forget about in the middle of my solves.
I needed this today. Thank you Simon for everything you do !
Rules: 02:55
Let's Get Cracking: 04:50
Simon's time: 1h1m50s
Puzzle Solved: 1:06:40
What about this video's Top Tier Simarkisms?!
Maverick: 4x (11:18, 11:18, 11:21, 11:23)
The Secret: 4x (14:53, 15:04, 25:48, 1:05:23)
Bobbins: 1x (23:45)
Three In the Corner: 1x (24:49)
And how about this video's Simarkisms?!
Ah: 19x (10:55, 14:16, 14:16, 21:25, 21:55, 23:06, 27:50, 28:17, 33:58, 38:23, 38:23, 39:38, 50:56, 51:51, 54:12, 55:06, 1:00:39, 1:02:33, 1:03:50)
Hang On: 15x (08:31, 09:59, 14:20, 16:55, 20:17, 21:28, 23:39, 24:20, 26:07, 27:50, 30:32, 30:32, 32:21, 39:38, 42:31)
Obviously: 11x (05:20, 06:36, 09:11, 12:10, 21:30, 27:50, 28:56, 35:35, 57:26, 57:28, 59:27)
In Fact: 10x (07:31, 08:31, 08:44, 17:12, 17:15, 24:24, 45:06, 58:04, 58:09, 1:01:58)
By Sudoku: 9x (10:51, 29:54, 30:12, 33:36, 43:25, 45:26, 45:31, 48:34, 58:27)
Sorry: 8x (23:57, 25:22, 29:33, 30:39, 32:07, 46:57, 49:04, 53:19)
Lovely: 6x (10:31, 10:34, 58:04, 58:06, 1:04:38, 1:04:46)
Beautiful: 6x (17:37, 18:49, 53:59, 55:49, 1:07:32, 1:07:32)
Naked Single: 5x (10:31, 23:45, 1:01:54, 1:04:00, 1:05:44)
The Answer is: 5x (19:01, 32:30, 39:53, 43:19, 54:56)
Pencil Mark/mark: 5x (26:31, 29:14, 34:54, 40:59, 1:04:10)
Weird: 5x (09:58, 17:20, 47:11, 1:01:56, 1:06:29)
Clever: 4x (30:44, 54:01, 58:36, 1:04:46)
What Does This Mean?: 4x (31:17, 35:15, 43:44, 45:49)
Uniqueness: 4x (37:35, 38:03, 38:11, 52:02)
Good Grief: 3x (55:49, 56:30, 58:33)
Stuck: 3x (25:22, 49:18, 49:21)
Brilliant: 3x (29:22, 29:33, 1:04:54)
Triangular Number: 3x (11:57, 12:08, 14:33)
Goodness: 2x (25:39, 50:58)
Naughty: 2x (51:09, 51:11)
Gorgeous: 2x (22:06, 58:33)
Shouting: 2x (51:16, 53:25)
I Have no Clue: 1x (32:30)
Ridiculous: 1x (46:47)
Discombobulating: 1x (1:06:07)
Alacrity: 1x (07:45)
I've Got It!: 1x (53:17)
Phone is Buzzing: 1x (02:02)
Progress: 1x (01:25)
Wow: 1x (20:58)
Next Trick: 1x (57:34)
Baffling: 1x (49:34)
Nature: 1x (18:26)
Most popular number(>9), digit and colour this video:
Seventy Eight (16 mentions)
Four (82 mentions)
Green (36 mentions)
Antithesis Battles:
High (4) - Low (3)
Even (12) - Odd (2)
Higher (3) - Lower (1)
White (7) - Black (2)
Row (33) - Column (16)
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!
You missed "By sudoku" at 1:01:36 and 1:06:18
35:30 This is a very helpful (and beautiful) deduction, and would have uniquely answered most of his subsequently asked questions 😊 If only he had written it down! Oh well, you can’t be perfect in live solves, he does a pretty excellent job and I have improved my solving massively thanks to these videos ☺️ Thanks Simon 😊
Your puzzle solves provide so much MUCH needed relaxation and it's greatly appreciated
Made great progress until halfway through the puzzle and then it came to a grinding halt a few times but soldiered through them. ~146 minutes to solve. Definitely deserves the higher difficulty ranking.
The shading to track digits feels like magic. I was impressed I was able to use it to solve the back half of the puzzle after I saw Simon do it on the front half with the 7/8 3/9 pairs.
I so enjoy watching every day! I would like to kindly suggest using the line tool and/or the letters more. I thought you could have used the line tool to outline the cages so you could just use colors for the digits. Still loved it and love to you and Mark this Holiday season! ❤
Or, you know, delete unnecessary cage colouring (e.g. the yellow and pink here) to allow those colours to be repurposed. But the line tool would be a good choice too.
Did it in 53:37, it was the first 1h+ video puzzle that I actually tried myself.
I finished in 46 minutes. This has got to be one of the wildest break-ins I have done. Seeing that the cage had to wrap around to the top, forcing the 30 cage to be 6789 was spectacular. Even better, I managed to beat Simon's time by quite a lot, which always feels good. It seems like this innocuous ruleset of a cage have to have the total in the leftmost portion of the uppermost part is incredibly powerful, which is kind of funny. Great Puzzle!
68 minutes! Wooohoo! This was such a pleasant journey through very exact clues, with barely any leeway in the solving path. Great experience! I loved the coloring of the 78 in the middle of the solve, I had to overengineer my coloring too ahaha!
Simon rarely to never deletes colors that are not needed, and it hurts to watch. Once I got to the bottom 3 boxes, I deleted all my coloring and started over. Assign individual colors to each cell in row 7. Then row 8 and 9 get mostly colored in due to the interactions with the 45 cage and the 43 cage. 7-8 pairs and 3-9 pairs appear, box 4 gets colored, and on and on. It's the true secret that Simon may not know. In any row, column, or box, you can assign each cell an individual, specific color.
It got really bad in the recent one where it seemed like everything was two+ colors. It was madness.
@@iambicpentakill I remember that puzzle. I just couldn't tell what was going on, it hurt my head!
I think leaving all that colouring in really held you back in this puzzle. Thanks for the solve!
1 hour, 3 minutes for me. Comparable time to Simon's, which I'm pleased about.
A superb, demanding puzzle.
Wow, what a puzzle. Took me 1:47:15, but I got there in the end. This channel has taught me so much.
That was a very neat explanation of uniqueness and how to use it (or to choose not to) at about 37 minutes. Thanks.
Yes but in this case I’m not sure it is correct because the 78 pairs could be fixed by the blue cage.
@@stephenbeck7222 Yes, that is a big pitfall of using uniqueness in variant puzzles is that there can be ways to disambiguate the digits that aren't immediately obvious.
51:24 for me. Kicking myself watching Simon's solve, because I left the 1 and 2 in box 4 unresolved for a shocking amount of time!
This was a lovely puzzle that didn't let up in difficulty all the way to the end. I really enjoyed needing to juggle the demands of building cages in the fog, tracing digits around the grid with colours, and basic arithmetic on killer cages (of which the last was by far the hardest for me!)
11:49 Think Simon made it harder on himself than needed here, you can very clearly see that there is not a cage corner at the bottom right of r5c3 (if you're not about that, compare the bottom left corner of the same cell, where the inside corner of the cage is clearly visible), so you can also yellow r6c4 which gives the maximum and thus exact extent of the 21 cage
Simon does seem to over complicate or over think quite a bit
This is what I did, but it seems like really squinting for a few pixels on my phone, I was wondering if there was an easier hit of logic that I was missing.
I used that too, but I do prefer to not rely on those little tiny things unless I have to, so I prefer Simon's route, which was in my view prettier, and not actually all that more complicated.
If only he stopped selecting and deselecting all the cells he was thinking about at this point, he might have seen it. Don’t know whether it’s part of the intended solve path, since you need sharp eyes to see it 😊
Super lovely fog puzzle. Started very nice, than become harder but I still could do it. Thanks for it! 😊
You can do hard things, and hard things can be fun.
This was a really fascinating puzzle. I can perhaps offer a bit of insight into Simon's question of whether finding the 1 in box 4 would circumvent the logic he used in box 5. I will say I found that 1 earlier, but the box 5 went largely in the same fashion - identify the cells on the centre white dot as 789, identify that 89 would not be possible due to box 5's 1, note that the upper-left cell of box 5 could not be from 789 due to seeing all three flavours of 789 in the 45 cage, and the only thing that differed in my logic was that rather than finding the 9 immediately, I had the top row of box 5 marked as 2345 (cell 1 for the aforementioned reason, and cells 2-3 because a higher digit on them would put four digits from 789 in the row), and got 9 in cell 8 from that.
So in short, maybe there was another approach also, but placing that box four 1 earlier doesn't really mess with the logic used to solve box 5 for me.
The rest of the puzzle for me boiled down to colouring 789's, some significant Goodliffeing in box 8, very tediously eliminating one candidate from one cell every few minutes or so, and then finally arriving at a way to identify a 9 in c3r4, which put a 78 pair into the bottom 45 cage. I didn't go hunting for 3's, but I think the 78's were what mattered, so in practice my path didn't really differ from Simon's much, other than that he's much faster than me lol.
An aside: I think (perhaps fortunately) that the uniqueness argument Simon mentioned for resolving the 78 pair would not actually have even been true. The 7 or 8 in cell c1r6 would see the bottom-left corner of the deadly pattern, and fix one of the two orientations as correct. Of course, it didn't end up being a 78 x-wing, and there was a proper logical way through it anyway, but perhaps it's assuaging to know that there truly wasn't (as far as I could spot) a true uniqueness argument to be had there.
Here’s a vote that you’re the sane one! Very much enjoy the oasis of calm in this lovely community! Particularly on a gloomy, grey day, when not feeling great and watching with my fluffy blanket and hot chocolate!
Save some hot chocolate for me my friend!! Grey, gloomy days aren't fun at all. Rain up by me all day today also. But nothing like a Simon solve to get us thru it. Hope you are feeling better. 🩵💙
@@davidrattner9 thank you my friend. Got your hot chocolate (with whipped cream) waiting!
I used the pen tool for tracking cages, left more options for coloring 789s. Actually, I think the only digits I didn’t end up assigning a color were 45s.
I like puzzles like this that have a clear path to solve. You can appreciate the work the creator did a lot more.
First time I’ve completed a puzzle quicker than Simon! 😮
Everyone else spent way too much of this video anxious about r6c4 not being yellow as well right?
I'm strangely charmed by puzzles like this which require logic based on what are, essentially, typographic and layout conventions. I'll bet whoever first standardized where the total goes in killer cages never dreamed of the perverse uses to which it would someday be put. 😊
Very very ..... beautiful foggy.
68:17 for me today and the first time I solved a video puzzle without any hints at all! What a day! 😂
Wonderful puzzle. I'm happy that I was able to solve it without peeking at Simons solve.
Just had to remember that "The Clue is awyas given"
At 20:30, what prevents the 18 cage from going up?
I agree, what’s the reason it couldn’t go up for the 18 cage
The clue being visible in the cage is what forces it to go down
@@Orangeremi aaah! I got stuck here for a while, this was exactly the hint I needed to keep going :) have put the video back on pause whilst I continue, cheers!
@@Orangeremi I see, thanks!
Because the total (18) indicates the top left cell of the cage.
Wooot i finished this one in 76:08 Great Puzzle, i got stuck and found some hidden gem to get on time after time after time!
Thank you Dorlir and Simon, now to watch how Simon did the puzzle!
I love fog of war puzzles! Cant wait to see how this one goes
At 20:01, how can we be certain that the 18sum cage in box5 dips vertically down into a 2 and 1? Can it not go upward into a 2 and then move right into box6 as 1? I can't understand how Simon is so certain
At around 19:20 Simon explains that (according to the rules) any cell going up would have to contain the cage total which is already given in r5c5.
@@cae13yt thank you that saved me a lot of angst wondering exactly @clay9085's question!
No, because we know the sum for the cage is in the highest row.
I was totally unable to solve this one, but having watched the video, I see why! Very interesting puzzle, just a little over my level still.
Simon was so close to making progress at 28:50. If he'd only gone on to ask himself where the green digit went in box 8 (I know, making him do sudoku in a sudoku), he would have seen that none of the possible positions allowed it to be a 2, and that green was therefore 4.
Or indeed before introducing green, just ask where 2 goes in box 8 😊
solved in 45:30. the middle section of this puzzle is so incredibly robust, in order to make progress I had to whittle down options for pencil marks until I forced a pair to resolve r9c5. up to that portion of the puzzle things were flying by in solving, and after that find things then broke open and the rest of the puzzle flew by too.
At 45:35 taking that 9 out of r9c4 leaves a 478 triple in blue, so r7c1+r8c1 are a 39 pair
Was going to say this.
The turned out to be a lot more straightforward than I thought at first sight. It was spoilt by a typo that revealed something I shouldn't have seen until later. Typos are a HUGE downside of these foggy puzzles. One slip of the keys, and you never feel as good about what you are achieving after that.
It might be solved with a built-in timer (1second should be enough)?
So basically nothing happens for about 0,5-1,0 seconds, after filling a cell with digits.
Another solution could be, that cells within the fog only allow a notation first, before entering the correct digit, which requires a bit more action from the user, and this could also be confusing.
Less stressful, if users can toggle these options on/off, if they consider themselves people who have no patience and/or trust their keyboard skills.
A double press perhaps for main numbers?
I just ignore what I've accidentally seen and look for the logical way of proceeding.
@@Yttria How can you unlearn what you've seen? I try to carry on still looking for a logical route to a solution, but that is always easier to spot with the added information you have.
@@steveunderwood3683 I can't unsee it but I don't use it until it's revealed another way.
Once again it's fascinating how Simon finds rather convoluted ways to prove things that could be very easily be proven in a different way :D
He's absolutely amazing at it and way better than I'll ever be but still it's very funny to me.
37:27 You can't even use uniqueness at this point as R6C1 would resolve the pattern in case the dot was 7-8, i.e it would only be a deadly pattern in case R6C1 is also part of a 7-8 deadly pattern which in turn would be resolved by R3C4. So both R3C4 and R6C1 would both have to be part of a deadly 7-8 patterns in order for the dot to be it as well, which is very unlikely.
41:05 finish. It took me a few minutes to spot the logic for what Simon labelled as the red cells, but other than that it was quite smooth flowing. Excellent puzzle!
I found the breakin very intuitive and pretty. Got badly stuck in the middle. But do love me a fog of war puzzle
Finished in 42:57. Very interesting use of large killer cages to eliminate possibilities particularly with the value constraint.
Fun puzzle!
16:25 - Anyone know why blue and orange couldn't be the same cage? Why can't a cage touch itself orthogonally, I've never heard that as a Killer Sudoku rule before.
I solved this one on my own(though I did use the error checker and spotted a mistake I made). The 789 conundrum was an absolute beast. Simon used colors. I deleted all the 78&9s and switched to pencil marking with A B C to represent the digits I knew had to be the same after banging my head against it for about 45 minutes.
48:00 Simon: "I thought my brain had cottoned on to something a few minutes ago, but I think I led myself astray."
Ron Howard: "He had."
Simon: "And that's very annoying."
Ron Howard: "It was."
51:00 Simon: "and you've been shouting at me, with justification, for ages...."
Ron Howard: "Actually, no one had even noticed this bit of logic, which was as brilliant as it was arcane. They'd been shouting about the 9 in the bottom left cage."
53:15 Simon: "Oh, no, I've got it again. This is appalling. I've just spotted something else that was completely obvious."
Ron Howard: "It really wasn't."
Simon: "I deserve to be shouted at."
Ron Howard: "But sure."
Ron Howard: "On the next Cracking the Cryptic... Simon switches from colors to the letter tool."
Simon: "♫That's B in the corner♫"/"♫That's C in the corner♫"/"♫That's D in the corner♫"/"♫That's E in the corner♫"/"♫That's G in the corner♫"
Ron Howard: "And Mark pencils a 123456789 nonuple. Which turns out to be the break-in."
At 51:19, Simon is right that we're shouting at him, but wrong about the reason. We're shouting because the bottom-left cage already has both flavours of 78 in it, so _both_ of the 3789s in box 7 reduce to 39.
@56.45 - the exact same thing took me a long time (what and how to colour ...). This is a lovely puzzle and I am enjoying the solve so far.
And finished a little differently from mine - I saw things I didn't quite see in my original solve (twas ever thus) - great solve, Simon. And that hard middle step is a bit unexpected - I suspect we may see some more fog puzzles which are not just fog-based logic but have interludes like this one.
It may have taken me about 1000 years, but I think this is the hardest sudoku I've ever solved without any help from Simon!
17:31 for me. What a fantastic puzzle, really enjoyed this one!!
Love the "secret" that a row/column/box/9unique numbers all add to 45.
Wow, 99:16 for me... I had a lot of difficulties wich scanning and coloring, but finally I did it! Fog of war remains a joy to solve. :-)
I'm not understanding the logic @20:50. Why can't the cell 2 cells above the 23 pair also be 23? Why can't the 18 cage curve upwards instead of downwards? I solved it up to the point, and even had more information but couldn't deduce why the cage must curve down. I had the upper white dot pair marked as either a 2 or 4 paired with a 3 for the longest time, but had already found the 5 to the left.
Because the clue of the cage is always in the most top left cell of that cage.
@@dorlirahmeti7576 ah... thanks.
Around 19:53 I am missing why a 3 couldn't go in r4c6 to complete the 18 cage in an upward fashion. If anyone understands I would love to know.
Because the rule, the clue of the cage is always on the most top left cell of that cage.
@@dorlirahmeti7576 Of course, thanks. Must've been having a brainfart haha
What a beautiful sudoku
I could not see why R6C6 is either 2 or 3. Couldn't the 8-cage go upwards with a 2 or 3 in R4C6? Quite a hard fog of war puzzle from the sudoku perspective, whereas the cages were not that hard to find. Great solution anyway!!
Stupid me. I now see
12:00 you don’t see marks in the bottom right of r5c3 so r6c4 is yellow too
2:07:02 - Crumbs; that was one of the more challenging FOW puzzles despite getting started quite quickly.
When Simon waxes on about if only he could eliminate the 9 im lower left of box 8, he could make all these deductions, and then he eliminates that 9 and ignores all those deductions
Anytime, I find myself annoyed with a secret explanation, I always remind myself I was a newcomer wants to, and I’m glad it was explained to me.
solved it in 132 minutes. the 7/8 problem at box 7 did break my head though. Couldn't find the logic steps you took and played out all possible solutions about it in my head until it finally broke :D
23:31.. where is the 2 in row 9?
Love this channel!❤
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Great puzzle, solved in 59 mins by shading the 7 and 8 and using deduction from there
I am a Portuguese fan and i relly love this kind of puzzles. I this puzzle i have a doubt. Can you clarify me?
I can't understand why in minute 20:30 this below values doesn' work
r: 4 c: 6 can't be a 2
r: 3 c: 6 can't be a 1
r:4 c: 5 can't be a 3
the 18 sum cage can't go up...
I really love watch you solving puzzles, but i need to understand it :D
Sorry about my english ;)
Want simon to pick one such video where he got stuck for a "premiere" Where he could see live if people were actually shouting at him while watching... (Spoiler - most of us are just hoping and praying and feeling very proud of ourselves for catching something you missed.. No anger- just love ❤)
The key to determining why one cell is the upper most left cell of a cage hinges on word order, go up and THEN left. This confused me for quite a while
They often say it wrong, but in this case the written rules of the puzzle are clear.
Why can't the initial cage (i.e. R2C1) merge into the 30 sum cage making it into an 8-cell cage summing to 30?
I'm glad Simon didn't use uniqueness since it would have been wrong. The cage from the left goes well into the foggy area and could have decided even a 78 pair.
Great puzzle. That logic in the middle (leading up to coloring e.g. r9c6) was really tough! 42:47
Is it bad to use uniqueness? At 38:00 he says there's a 78 deadly pattern, but he won't use uniqueness.
In this particular example, one cell is part of a cage, so it would not be a deadly pattern, but it sounded like a "cheaty" use of logic.
I'm missing something: why couldn't 2/3 also be a possibility also going up just before 22:37? If 2/3 is a possibility going up then you couldn't put that 9 in box 5.
It's killing me because I have going up to be a possibility for that cage and then I'm stuck and I can't make any more progress.
@@jkwatcher47The cage cant go up, because the "18" clue is in the top left corner of the cage. so from the 18, the cage can only go down.
@@schneebaer42the string of curse words that just came out of my mouth for missing something so simple!
Thank you! This was going to drive me nuts!
Why can't the 30 cage be connected to the cage abutting it? (aside from it not being so in the solution)
Simon's logic seems to skip over the possibility that the 30 cage loops back on itself in a non-standard cage formation where adjacent cells may or may not be separated by a cage wall. If there is a particular cage rule that limits this, it would be nice to explain in the future.
There wouldn't be a wall there, it's just one of the killer cage rules. It would look like the 2x2 square in the 21 cage (unless I misunderstand you).
@@iambicpentakillI think Lauren's point is that it assumes you're familiar with the non-stated rule that cages do not bend back on themselves, i.e. they don't have walls separating two cells in the same cage, in a U-turn for example.
It's a fair point. If you have lots of experience with cages in variant Sudokus, then you likely just take that for granted. But there isn't anything in the rules that state cages behave this way, or even that "standard cage construction rules apply".
Even if you forget that cages don't bend back on themselves (as I did), it's still not very hard to prove that the 30 cage can't be connected to the cage on the other side of the white dot.
The shortest possible distance connecting those 2 partial cages that are visible right at the start is 8 cells. And an 8 cell cage must have a total of at least 36, thus they must be separate cages.
It wasn't until I was watching Simon later and wondering why he didn't bother proving that, that I realised that the visible cage boundaries are enough 🤦
@@jesscarrier4180 This makes sense now, and I was making a simple mistake. I was miscalculating the box and assuming it could simply leave a 5 out, but that's obviously wrong since the box would need to be 40.
Maybe I need to stop skipping over the explanations of the secret in the next few videos.
I was stuck in this puzzle a while, and I still don't understand how you deduce that the 18 cage around 21:00 has to go down? it can also go up towards the white dot. You state that the cell below the 78 pair has to be a 2or3. but it technically doesn't, only if the cage goes down, which it does not need to do. I really don't get how to proceed from here...
At around 19:20 Simon explains that (according to the rules) any cell going up would have to contain the cage total which is already given in r5c5.
@@cae13yt yeah I realized after as well... i even read the rules again and missed it
Cage totals always go in the highest, leftmost caged cell. So if the cage went up, the corner total would not be in the cell its marked in.
Its the same logic he used in the beginning to determine that the green (later blue) cage in box1 must go into row 1, since the leftmost cell in row 2 _is not marked with the cage total_
@@elLooto Yes thank you! I saw some time later... I was just being dumb. Managed to solve it eventually :)
@@jeythegrey nice work! (and sorry for saying what someone else did, thats the hazards of scrolling the comments during the vid, I guess)
Very nicely contrived, thanks.
I enjoyed this puzzle
It was actually brilliant
Have people made more variations on the fog of war? I remember one was "dense fog" where it only reveals the square itself. You could make one where you have to see around corners, or where the revealed squares are halfway across the board...
That was challenging and fun.
Since about 14:17 I was waiting for r6c4 to be coloured yellow. 🤪
Sorry but on the 18 cage in the middle saying the cage goes down without considering it could go up as either 3, or 2 with the 1 in box 2 or 6 seems to be guessing.
The cage can't go up because the clue needs to be in the top cell of the cage, as someone pointed out to me.
@37:50 -- There is no obvious uniqueness issue here. The alleged deadly pattern would be disambiguated by one of its cells being "the red digit" and us being able to determine the value of another "red digit" elsewhere in the grid at some point.
Me: green is in the cage so you can place green in Box 7, and do a LOT of other stuff than.
Simon: I'm stuck.
Me: desperately trying to shout back in time to him.
Simon: still stuck.
I really have to work on my time bending capabilities... 😅😂
This one I really wanted to end with a 3 in the corner!