Amber, welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Cracking the Cryptic. You will find here a gentle community of frontal nerdity. I wholeheartedly recommend you to read the comments and enjoy their insights. It'll do wonders for your soul, guaranteed.
It started like that for me too. "Let's just click on this recommended video. It will be a one time thing 'cause I can't see myself watching sudoku solving videos"... That was a few months ago and here I am, daily watching two videos.
I know this is a joke and it’s funny but seriously Simon is so clever for seeing the thing in front of him a deducing in so many layers. Such a joy to watch x
I always feel so bad when Simon gets stressed about how long it's taking. So, please, take your time, Simon. We're settled in and enjoying solving puzzles with you every day.
@@jovi_al I agree. That is a very insightful comment. It contains a lesson for much of life itself, be it science, politics, religion, philosophy, mathematics, relationships, you name it. In a weird way this channel touches parts of my cortex other exposures cannot reach. I am an addict.
@@amoswittenbergsmusings Agreed, my approach to science has always been that of asking questions rather than seeking answers. If you already have an idea what you expect to find, then it is all too easy to miss important things that you weren't seeking, but that could have helped.
@@philm5872 green 8/9 in R4C2 and R3C5 make it such that in box 1 green can only go into R1C1/3. Similar logic for purple in box 2. Then it triggers a chain reaction to limit all the remaining greens and purples.
Simon disambiguating green 89's at 1:05:45: I don't think I could have done that earlier. Green 89 in r4c2 looking into box 1 for almost an hour: Am I a joke to you?
A livestream with the help of a chat would be an interesting new format. I wonder how fast we could solve these if we had all of our brains to pick at once!
A small suggestion on a potential coloring improvement you could do: What I do is when I want to indicate that a color is in one of 2 or 3 cells, I mark them with the color as well as light gray, using the multicolor option. It looks pretty close to white, so it appears at first glance like the color's only taking up half of the square. It really helps me distinguish actual colors from color pencil marks, so to speak
I do the same, though it would be nice if more colors were available. Using this means you only have 8, and the yellow is very similar to the highlighter so I feel like it's really 7.
I’ve been watching for a few months now and saw that this one was going to be over an hour so I figured it was going to be another enjoyable watch rather than a solve. Once I saw the puzzle I immediately felt like I had an idea of how to break in! Decided to give it my own go with just using colors and the number 7 until the very end and was able to enjoy such a beautiful puzzle myself in a 43:21 solve! I’m usually not able to get anywhere close to your times, unless it’s a color heavy puzzle! Love the videos and the puzzles so much CTC!
I have to opposite situation! I’m more of a pencil marker person so if I have to color I get the numbers confused... altho those tend to get you stuck at some point and you have to guess which domino pair is which to continue (usually if I get that right it’s solvable in one go)
When you did the green logic at about 19:00, you could have carried on to do a similar thing with purple. You can restrict purple to only being in row 1 within box 2 (r1c4 and r1c6) which then allows you to restrict it to only two cells in box 3 (r2c7 and r2c8). Then, looking at box 1, you can restrict green to being in two cells (r1c1 and r1c3) which then give you green in box 3 (r2c8) forcing purple to be r2c7.
18:46 "Is there some way of repeating that logic? Nooo..." BUT THE ANSWER IS YES!! Green in box 1 rules out green in R1C8. You found it at 1:5:21, I was shouting to color green in box 1 for almost 50 minutes LOL! Very nice puzzle and amazing solve! (apart from green in box 1 ;-))
I saw this earlier too. I went to the comments to see if it had been pointed out not long after I made the rare insight before Simon and I appreciate you putting in the time stamp. I haven’t finished watching the video and now I know that Simon won’t see it for quite a while. I can stop asking myself if he is about to see it. I’m going to include time stamps for such revelations in the hopes of keeping others from having to obsess over such things.
Man, at this point, a 4-hour epic movie is inevitable. Especially if the thumbnail features the devil himself. Maybe call it “Cracking The Cryptic: The Epic.”
I'm just waiting for the video that is 3 hours long called "Hardest sudoku ever!!" And it turns out to be 10 20 minute sudoku puzzles combined into 1 video.
Simon stares at the 56 cell box 9r8 - 'what colour is it?'. Doesn't scan the row or column it's in which would tell him. Not the only time he puts some info in a box, but does not check the rest of the box (missing the green cell in row 1, for example). Of course I would not have got a single digit in this puzzle, but I can lean back and take a birds-eye view over the whole puzzle and try and whisper in Simons ear the odd hint - he heard me once, so I'm ever hopeful.
30:50 I have a simpler idea! The cells you've marked 567 all see the squares in-between them (above the pink & green 8-9s), along with the 1-2 pair at the top. So the two cells (r4c3 & r4c4) must be a 3-4 pair. That clears up a lot from there.
Oh I see, you hadn't figured out it was a 1-2 pair at the top at this point. The arrows add up to 17 (9+8) so with 1-2-3-4-5 in box 4/5 it can have a max of 2 at the top.
This was such a wonderful puzzle. Thanks for showing it to us and giving us a really awesome tool to do it with. I never thought I'd say to myself, "so that makes this a gray/green pair" when solving a sudoku.
12:56 Because of the criss-crossed arrows, you know that the total sum of the two arrows passing through box 4 is 8+9. You also know that the digits on the arrows in box 4 are either 1+2+3+4+5 or 1+2+3+4+6. Therefore the bottom right corner of box 1 can never be 3, and by symmetry you have a 1-2 pair.
Yes - this was a MUCH easier way to finally get going in the center of the grid. It would have probably saved Simon 10 minutes or more of hard slog there.
1:11 the 5/6 in box 9 is red, sudoku box 7, found 1:20. 1:17 box 3 cell 7 is blue, sees both the 3/4s, found 1:25. Alternatively, B6C9 and B9C1 see each other, and both see B9C9, so it can't be grey, resolves everything. The duel color option is so very useful.
Oh I'm glad you actually tried this puzzle, this is one of my favorite Sudokus of all time and I expect you to grind to a halt as well :) Also 1:01:52 one of the very moments only from CTC
About 10 times I was seeing stuff Simon hadn’t seen waiting for him to spot it…. then he rules it out for something I’ve not seen. Such a clever person! There’s more going on in his head than what he says.
43:16, you *can* color in the 12 pair in boxes 1 and 2. E.g., if yellow is 1, then red is 6, purple is 9, and that gives the coloring for that pair. :-D 1:12:48 “Is there a way that we can tell what goes into those squares?” *Yes!!!* 😭
This was incredible. Probably my favorite video, and I've watched everyday since you popped up on my feed last year. You just solved two puzzles at once, one with numbers and one with colors. Very, very well done!
This is now approaching a 3D sudoku. Soon we'll have a sudoku using quantum spin too. I look forward to expressions like; "This cell can't be a 4, 7, or green. And because of the red 1/2 spin in R3C5S+, it's either purple or down or an 8. By sudoku."
I have been shouting "green in box" 1 for 10 minutes, 20 minutes in. Hopefully he sees it soon. edit: 46:44 he sees the logic I have been spying for 30 minutes, but on 7s. Agh! Edit: "Sorry if you've all seen something and I haven't." Greeeeeeeen in box 1! It will disambiguate purple in box 3, which will give you purple in box 9, and then in boxes 7 and 8. So for the love of Green, Simon, GREEN.
@@flabort I was in the same boat...Yelling at Simon to put Green in Box 1 to resolve Green and Purple in Box 3...Then I remembered that I'm not nearly smart enough to even have gotten the first 7...sigh
I think the much easier way to break the boxes 4&5 early on is to note that each one contains an 8 and a 9 arrow, so 17 per box (rather than 34 in total). Then the only permutation is a 1 in row 3 with 12346 and a 2 in row 3 with 12345. Then you note that if either the 5 or the 6 goes on the inside arrow in its box, it rules out all of the possibilities for itself in the other box by knights move. This shows that the outer arrows are 125 or 126, and the inner arrows are 134 and 234.
I think it's fitting that the last thing Simon resolved on the puzzle was the thing he noticed and could have resolved at 1:01:50, when black and grey were forced into the same two spaces in box 3, giving the blue.
Talk about a beast of a puzzle, I managed to solve it in 87 minutes. Truly astonishing. I basically had to color the entire Sudoku, which was an extreme endeavor in and of itself, and let me tell you how glad I am over the multicolor option now, I managed to color the entire grid and then and only then could I put in any other digit than those pesky 7s.
This has got to be one of the very best puzzles I’ve ever seen. Just astonishing. I say we save this one for the second cracking the cryptic book 😜 Weirdly, I found it far from being as difficult as some puzzles Simon crashes within 45 minutes and that I often can’t finish on my own. It "only" took me about 1h20 here.
19:40 - Simon gives up on Purples and Greens, but he could have isolated BOTH of them in Box 3. If you use both Knight's Move and traditional sudoku in Boxes 1 and 2, you can infer that the Greens and Purples MUST be in the top row, forcing them to Row 2 in Box 3, and the order is fixed once you figured out that Box 9's Greens are in Column 9.
The colors really through him off. At the end, I could see the different color interactions while he was busy going through the numbers. He needed the numbers cleared up to see the final moves.
At 1:05:50, you say "I don't think I could have [placed green in r2c8] earlier," when it fact you've been able to place that since 18:45! If you had looked at box 1 then, you could already tell that green was restricted to r1 by sudoku and knight's move, forcing the green domino in box 3 to be restricted to r2c8.
Hilarious puzzle! It can actually be completely resolved to uniquely colored pairs + 7s, at 1:22:55 when Simon makes the deduction for the 5, instead he could: - eliminate 12 from r1c3 (cause it sees both r3c3 and r3c4), that makes r2c3 red. - Deduce the coloring of r3c3 and r3c4 from red+yellow=7 (arrow in box 6) and hence 7+orange=pink (arrow in c1), which makes r3c4 orange (arrow in c4) - Grey can be excluded from r6c9 because it sees both grey boxes in box9. After these, the deduction for red being 5 allows going from 7s only to a complete grid in 10s. :)
34:43 each side (box4 + r3c3 or box5 + r3c4) has to sum up to 17 (a green and a purple) and 3 in row 3 would make the corresponding box a sum 14 in 5 cells (min 15). No need to try out combinations of 8 and 9.
62:33 for me. At the start, the 2 arrows in each box add to 17. So the parts inside can't both add to the same amount because the 2 digits on the arrows outside the boxes would have to also be the same. So one box used a 5 and the other used a 6. This means the 2 cells in the arrows outside the boxes are a 12 pair.
Really good cracking job! The time you gave up with the 8-9-coloring I found that in box 1 the green cell eliminates green from row 2 and forces it into row 1. This helped a lot, as I could find all the green and most of the purple cells.
These long solves are the best mystery movies in cinema. Simon, even if you go down some blind alleys, we're enjoying the journey. These videos are better than anything Hollywood is producing now. Simon, I present to you my Oscar for best actor in a leading role. You deserve it as much as Anthony Hopkins.
1:11:26 when you place the 56 in box 9 you know it’s red. Effectively the blue pairs in cells 3 and 6 form an X-wing (knights move) so it has to be red
Correct! (Correctamundo, a word I've never used before and hopefully never will again.) That was jolly difficult! I got very stuck on how to disambiguate anything after placing 7 7s. Turned out I was missing a couple of things and one was a kickself obvious one. Finally got there in 122 minutes having found the other 84 digits in the last few minutes which I presume was exactly as intended. Excellent puzzle but so hard and a solve too long to be able to watch any of Simon's solve until tomorrow. Something to look forward to if the day allows. Still, very pleased to have finished it at all. This morning brain wasn't up to managing an easy puzzle.
My first time shouting at Simon, I feel so accomplished. I'd been silently shouting about the greens in box 1 and purple in box 2 for over 30 minutes. I think I'm getting better at this whole sudoku thing. Thanks Simon.
You could fully color the grid. The coloring of the 1 and 2 in row 3 is determinable by using the 7-red-yellow arrow. Red+Yellow = 7, therefore Purple = 7 + Orange. Since Black and Grey are also 7, R3C4 is Orange, and R3C3 is then Yellow. That'll let you disambiguate the Reds, Oranges, and Yellows in the first 3 rows. R6C9, before you started filling in digits, could be said to be not Grey because it'd eliminate the only options for Grey in box 9, which would have solved your Grey/Blue/Black sets in the last 3 columns. Since there's not a pair for 7s, you'd be able to do the whole grid in just colors + 7s, and then finish the puzzle with the arrow in box 8 like you did in your solve.
At 20:00 You could have get the positions of green and purple in box 3 by using the knights move in box 1 you get the green digit in row 1 so it had to go into the middle of box 3. Same if you look on purple in box 2. Purple would be in row 1 so again in box 3 it would be in row 2. While the center is green and there's already a purple in column 9 it would go into row 2 column 7.
@@Keyboardje well actually in this case at that point, I could have told to set green in box one, ore that R3C3 is yellow. But that is not the point. It is just fun to solve riddles with several people. Also there are more Ideas to go around. And if no one has an idea about how to make progress, everyone feels better about the fact, that they have no clue.
We have found the fourth man. (as a reference to the 4th cambridge spy which is just so of knowledge all round). Is this kind of language prevalent in the world Simon inhabits or all just sloshing around in his head ?
I know I'm late to the party so please forgive me if this has already been discussed, but an easier way to find the makeup of the four arrows, once you have proven that the circles have to be 8s and 9s, is to think of the numbers on the arrows in boxes 1 and 4. Those now have to sum up to 17, but the numbers in just box 4 are at least 15. That means there's no 3 in r3c3, and similarly r3c4. This proves you have 12346 in one of the boxes, meaning one of the 9 sums has to be 126. Then the other two 1s have to go to the 8 sums, therefore the other 9 is 234 and the two 8s are 134 and 125.
19:30 "I don't believe I've just ruled out purple from these 2 squares by knights move when there's a purple here"... Simon, I had to chuckle at that because I had just ruled out purple in box 3 by exactly the same method!
Thanks to the Yellow + Red = 7 arrow on the right side, you could have figured out the colors of the 1&2 pairs in row 3 very early on. Basically, If Red is low, Yellow is high, and vise versa. So Yellow is the same as Blue since Blue is the opposite of Red (high or low). Therefore thanks to Green in row 3 and its arrow, we know 1+2+Blue = Green, and thus Green, Yellow and Blue must all be either low (1,5,8) or high (2,6,9). So the Green in row 6 must have a Yellow on its arrow on row 3 regardles of its value.
At around 30:00, an easier way to notice that You can't have both 9 sums be 234 is that You've already deduced that the other arrows are 125, 134, and 234. We know that there must be three 1's, in all the arrows total, so the last sum must include a 1
At ~24:00 mark: A simpler way without diving into specific arrow compositions: 1. Note that the two arrows on c13 add up to 17, so r3c3 is at most 17-15=2; the same can se said for r3c4, so r3c34 is a 12 pair 2. Then the arrow-cells in boxes 4 and 5 have to be 12345 on one side and 12346 on the other 3. We claim that 5 and 6 cannot go in r5c34; WLOG let r5c3=5, then 5 cannot go in box 5 because the arrows in box 5 would be 12346 4. Therefore r5c34 is a 34 pair, and thus r4c34 sum to 7; if r4c34 is 16 or 25 then one of the arrows will add to 10 or 11, so r4c34 is also 34 pair 5. Therefore the arrows in c1 and c6 are 125 and 126, and we rule out 1234 from r5c8 and continue from there.
Phew, that was insane. I didn't feel like going slowly at all, but it took me 1:40:43 regardless. I really got stuck at Simon's 54:24 for quite some time, amazing that he saw it so quickly. Beautiful but terribly hard puzzle! :)
Jeebus ... I'm not sure where the line between 'long chain' and 'bifurcation' is, but I'm claiming a win on this one ... in a total time of 1:37:18. I ended up using uniqueness to figure some parts out (but going through to the inevitable dead-end to prove it to myself), but I don't believe I ever 'guessed' anything in my solve. Insane puzzle!
me, too. I have skipped the last 2-3 sudokus because they've been boringly short and fast. I only live to watch sudoku movies now. It's my only reason to live LOL
Here's another way to earlier see that r3c1-2 is a 12 pair, that is not containing a 3: If there was a 3 in there, the minimum for that together with the five arrowed cells in the box below it would be 1+2+3+4+5+3 = 18, so the circled cells for those two arrows would have to be 9 and 9 which isn't possible (because then there is no place for a 9 in the block with the arrows).
I'm just intelligent enough to barely follow the thoughts explained to solve this monster. It is a delight to vicariously understand how a genius solves it and kind of know how he pulled it off
20:04 You just said that you couldn't do any more with the 89s. You haven't even placed the 89s in Box 3 yet. Given the totals of green and purple arrows are 17, and you have one green and and one purple arrow occupying 5 squares in both Box 4 and Box 5, the maximum number that can go in those arrows outside Boxes 4 and 5 are 1 and 2. This proves that the squares off the arrows not occupied by 89 must be a 67 and a 57 pair respectively. These pairs look into both r5c3 and r5c4, which remove 5, 6, and 7 from those squares, and with the 12 at the top of those central arrows, r5c3 and r5c4 are restricted to a 34 pair, which makes the final squares on those arrows a 34 pair as well.
Got this one in just under 3 hours. Feels good anytime I'm close to/ under 2x Simon's time! Very satisfying when I finally found how to collapse the pairs.
Nice to see Simon struggling as much with an 87 minute Sudoku as I do with a 27 minute Sudoku ^^ but it's getting better with the easier puzzles lately for me
Holy Toledo, what a puzzle. Took me 3:36 over 2 days. Constrained the arrow complex to a 34 sum and specific 8/9 combos, then started coloring some things, then everything. I got badly stuck at one point until I noted that r7c5 sees a 5/6 pair in r8, then wound up with nothing but colored pairs, placed 7s, and a single 1/2 "deadly Battenburg" in r2/r3. The 2 stray arrows resolved everything nicely. Now to watch Simon!
Great puzzle! I ended up fully coloring every square in the grid before filling in any digits (aside from the 7’s). The multi-color feature was extremely useful on this puzzle. It would have been nearly impossible without it.
I did too, very colorful, but I was afraid there must be two solutions to the puzzle, because all I had was number pairs, except for the sevens. I had to watch Simon until he showed me that the red 56 in box 8 could not be a 6, due to causing both green & purple to be 9. Once I had that digit [5], the whole puzzle was solved in about a minute. 😍
1:05:40 you could have deduced the "greens" in the box 1 to be in row 1, giving you a green in the center of box 3, very early on in the solve. I was really waiting for you to find that one :p. My solve also took forever, I finally resorted to uniqueness: The arrow in box 8 had to be the thing that resolved the puzzle, so it had to include a 3/4 or the entire 3/4 pattern would be impossible to disambiguate.
I love you Simon ... I play at 1.25x speed usually and every now and then I focus on the numbers and its as if C3PO is telling me how to solve the puzzle. cheers!
58:30 Simon has finally found the most complicated way of disambiguating purple and green... Which he could have done at 19:42 already had he not thought to himself "I can't see it so i won't bother looking" ........ ALSO ........ GREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN
Enjoying every minute of this logic show. I could see some clues before Simon did but most of them either never or much later. I like both, long didactic and short easier solutions. Keep going, please.
Well done for keeping your energy up, your scanning does seem to show a bit of fatigue towards the end of these epics, giving some screen shouting opportunities !! Hurrah for the audience!
Starting at 1:01, the 3-4 combo in box 2 both see r3c7 by knights move and could have lead to a completely different chain of logic to solve the puzzle. Simon was looking for and finding similar cells for a while and never really looked at that one until the very end.
If you observe that {red + yellow = 7 = light gray + gray}, then that {7 + orange = purple} you can color the 12 pair in third row right at the beginning, making the whole stuff sligthly easier.
When I'm struggling at work, I find myself muttering "Come on Simon". My name isn't simon
When I get frustrated at video games, I start to curse, then catch myself and say "Bobbins!" instead.
I live alone.
@@antonyduhamel1166 i actually adapted bobbins too
Me a week ago: what is this doing in my recommended
Me now addicted to watching a man who solves sudoku puzzles
Amber, welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Cracking the Cryptic. You will find here a gentle community of frontal nerdity. I wholeheartedly recommend you to read the comments and enjoy their insights. It'll do wonders for your soul, guaranteed.
I'm in the same boat.
you are not an orphan there Amber
It started like that for me too. "Let's just click on this recommended video. It will be a one time thing 'cause I can't see myself watching sudoku solving videos"... That was a few months ago and here I am, daily watching two videos.
Yep, this is mesmerizing
"This cell must be either 3, 4, or blue"
I think our Sudoku channel has spiraled out of control.
I know this is a joke and it’s funny but seriously Simon is so clever for seeing the thing in front of him a deducing in so many layers. Such a joy to watch x
I always feel so bad when Simon gets stressed about how long it's taking. So, please, take your time, Simon. We're settled in and enjoying solving puzzles with you every day.
we literally see the length of the video when we click it
i spread them out over a few days if i don't have time.
I wish we got to see the occasional video where Simon fails to solve. It would be very enlightening to see where and how a master like him gets stuck.
So I got it now, Sudoku is not about finding the right numbers, it is asking the right questions about numbers.
beautifully put!
@@jovi_al I agree. That is a very insightful comment. It contains a lesson for much of life itself, be it science, politics, religion, philosophy, mathematics, relationships, you name it. In a weird way this channel touches parts of my cortex other exposures cannot reach.
I am an addict.
@@amoswittenbergsmusings Agreed, my approach to science has always been that of asking questions rather than seeking answers. If you already have an idea what you expect to find, then it is all too easy to miss important things that you weren't seeking, but that could have helped.
oh man that’s so well said
Simon: "It's not one or two, it's red!"
Me: *struggling to open a packet of crisps* "Ofcourse!"
Grabbing popcorn and settling in. Nothing like watching one of the most positive people in the world solve a sudoku puzzle.
Sounds like a good plan. I have had a few possible puzzles lately, time to just sit back and enjoy the ride. (And scream about scanning mistakes.)
A praise to Simon
Well said
I love the guy truly but I'm willing to bet that you could pop that corn on his head as the video goes on.
Watched this with my 5 month old and it knocked him out to sleep. Thank you Simon. I throughly enjoyed it as well.
“So there’s no 1 here - apart from me.”
19:38 *green in box 3 is placable*
Simon : I give up on greens and purples
01:05:48 *finally discovers it*
Simon : I dont think I could do it before
Green and purple were placeable in box three
Placing the green in box three solves all of the purples! God I was looking at that the whole time waiting.
I just paused at 23:58 to see if anyone spotted this. I’m happy I noticed, and am now expecting a 40 minute roller coaster ride of logic.
How is it placable?
@@philm5872 green 8/9 in R4C2 and R3C5 make it such that in box 1 green can only go into R1C1/3. Similar logic for purple in box 2. Then it triggers a chain reaction to limit all the remaining greens and purples.
Simon disambiguating green 89's at 1:05:45: I don't think I could have done that earlier.
Green 89 in r4c2 looking into box 1 for almost an hour: Am I a joke to you?
Jep i've been screaming it since they beginning... Simon should livestream lol, these videos are uncut by default and the viewers could help
Wow livestream solving would be amazing
yesss thank you
A livestream with the help of a chat would be an interesting new format. I wonder how fast we could solve these if we had all of our brains to pick at once!
The best part is it wouldn't have really helped much!
A small suggestion on a potential coloring improvement you could do: What I do is when I want to indicate that a color is in one of 2 or 3 cells, I mark them with the color as well as light gray, using the multicolor option. It looks pretty close to white, so it appears at first glance like the color's only taking up half of the square. It really helps me distinguish actual colors from color pencil marks, so to speak
Yes. Just crack the code and include white as a possibility.
@@BremSterPuzzles agreed, especially since with the method I use, the yellow and the green in the pencil marks are very close to the light gray color
Exactly what I was going to say.
I do the same, though it would be nice if more colors were available. Using this means you only have 8, and the yellow is very similar to the highlighter so I feel like it's really 7.
@@sly1024 Hogy áll a kedvenc városom a Dunán, gyönyörű Budapest? Évente legalább ötször jártam, de hosszú évek óta nem vagyok Magyarországon.
I’ve been watching for a few months now and saw that this one was going to be over an hour so I figured it was going to be another enjoyable watch rather than a solve. Once I saw the puzzle I immediately felt like I had an idea of how to break in! Decided to give it my own go with just using colors and the number 7 until the very end and was able to enjoy such a beautiful puzzle myself in a 43:21 solve! I’m usually not able to get anywhere close to your times, unless it’s a color heavy puzzle! Love the videos and the puzzles so much CTC!
I have to opposite situation! I’m more of a pencil marker person so if I have to color I get the numbers confused... altho those tend to get you stuck at some point and you have to guess which domino pair is which to continue (usually if I get that right it’s solvable in one go)
Whenever I hear "Bobbins", I see Gollum being tortured yelling "SHIIIRREEE! BOBBIIINNNNSSSS!"
When you did the green logic at about 19:00, you could have carried on to do a similar thing with purple. You can restrict purple to only being in row 1 within box 2 (r1c4 and r1c6) which then allows you to restrict it to only two cells in box 3 (r2c7 and r2c8).
Then, looking at box 1, you can restrict green to being in two cells (r1c1 and r1c3) which then give you green in box 3 (r2c8) forcing purple to be r2c7.
Exactly, I was waiting for him to do the purples in box two, but he gave up just before that with the greens in box 3.
Looked at the time and smiled
Thirteen minutes in and no sign of a digit but it’s absolutely beautiful
18:46 "Is there some way of repeating that logic? Nooo..." BUT THE ANSWER IS YES!! Green in box 1 rules out green in R1C8. You found it at 1:5:21, I was shouting to color green in box 1 for almost 50 minutes LOL! Very nice puzzle and amazing solve! (apart from green in box 1 ;-))
Same! I was screaming mentally and he even says I couldn't have done that earlier.
I saw this earlier too. I went to the comments to see if it had been pointed out not long after I made the rare insight before Simon and I appreciate you putting in the time stamp. I haven’t finished watching the video and now I know that Simon won’t see it for quite a while. I can stop asking myself if he is about to see it.
I’m going to include time stamps for such revelations in the hopes of keeping others from having to obsess over such things.
Man, at this point, a 4-hour epic movie is inevitable. Especially if the thumbnail features the devil himself. Maybe call it “Cracking The Cryptic: The Epic.”
Cracking the Cryptic: The Snyder Cut.
@@josephdlist The Phisynmonefel cut. (Phistomefel + Synder + Simon...)
I'm just waiting for the video that is 3 hours long called "Hardest sudoku ever!!" And it turns out to be 10 20 minute sudoku puzzles combined into 1 video.
Simon stares at the 56 cell box 9r8 - 'what colour is it?'. Doesn't scan the row or column it's in which would tell him. Not the only time he puts some info in a box, but does not check the rest of the box (missing the green cell in row 1, for example). Of course I would not have got a single digit in this puzzle, but I can lean back and take a birds-eye view over the whole puzzle and try and whisper in Simons ear the odd hint - he heard me once, so I'm ever hopeful.
"Where is X in this box? The answer is I don't know, but..." gets me every time.
It took me 48 minutes to get as far as Simon did in 36. I'm claiming that as a win!
i agree, that is a win
I knew you were going to solve this one! I've been waiting so long to know how in the world this puzzle is solvable. Thank you so much.
30:50 I have a simpler idea! The cells you've marked 567 all see the squares in-between them (above the pink & green 8-9s), along with the 1-2 pair at the top. So the two cells (r4c3 & r4c4) must be a 3-4 pair. That clears up a lot from there.
Oh I see, you hadn't figured out it was a 1-2 pair at the top at this point. The arrows add up to 17 (9+8) so with 1-2-3-4-5 in box 4/5 it can have a max of 2 at the top.
This was such a wonderful puzzle. Thanks for showing it to us and giving us a really awesome tool to do it with. I never thought I'd say to myself, "so that makes this a gray/green pair" when solving a sudoku.
12:56 Because of the criss-crossed arrows, you know that the total sum of the two arrows passing through box 4 is 8+9. You also know that the digits on the arrows in box 4 are either 1+2+3+4+5 or 1+2+3+4+6. Therefore the bottom right corner of box 1 can never be 3, and by symmetry you have a 1-2 pair.
Yes - this was a MUCH easier way to finally get going in the center of the grid. It would have probably saved Simon 10 minutes or more of hard slog there.
I'll take this over a 90 minute movie any day!
1:11 the 5/6 in box 9 is red, sudoku box 7, found 1:20. 1:17 box 3 cell 7 is blue, sees both the 3/4s, found 1:25. Alternatively, B6C9 and B9C1 see each other, and both see B9C9, so it can't be grey, resolves everything. The duel color option is so very useful.
I'm absolutely staggered that that grid was solvable, given the initial givens. There was so little to go on! Brilliant solve.
Oh I'm glad you actually tried this puzzle, this is one of my favorite Sudokus of all time and I expect you to grind to a halt as well :)
Also 1:01:52 one of the very moments only from CTC
About 10 times I was seeing stuff Simon hadn’t seen waiting for him to spot it…. then he rules it out for something I’ve not seen. Such a clever person! There’s more going on in his head than what he says.
43:16, you *can* color in the 12 pair in boxes 1 and 2. E.g., if yellow is 1, then red is 6, purple is 9, and that gives the coloring for that pair. :-D
1:12:48 “Is there a way that we can tell what goes into those squares?” *Yes!!!* 😭
This was incredible. Probably my favorite video, and I've watched everyday since you popped up on my feed last year.
You just solved two puzzles at once, one with numbers and one with colors. Very, very well done!
Wow, this was the most confusing coloring Simon has managed to produce, that in itself is an accomplishment.
This is now approaching a 3D sudoku. Soon we'll have a sudoku using quantum spin too.
I look forward to expressions like; "This cell can't be a 4, 7, or green. And because of the red 1/2 spin in R3C5S+, it's either purple or down or an 8. By sudoku."
GREEEEEEEEN! :(
Edit: Good Lord, writing this comment actually helped, Simon saw it immediately! :)
I have been shouting "green in box" 1 for 10 minutes, 20 minutes in. Hopefully he sees it soon.
edit: 46:44 he sees the logic I have been spying for 30 minutes, but on 7s. Agh!
Edit: "Sorry if you've all seen something and I haven't." Greeeeeeeen in box 1! It will disambiguate purple in box 3, which will give you purple in box 9, and then in boxes 7 and 8. So for the love of Green, Simon, GREEN.
Ok, not doing a third edit, I feel like my second edit is where your comment was. Simon finally saw it, what a relief.
@@flabort I was in the same boat...Yelling at Simon to put Green in Box 1 to resolve Green and Purple in Box 3...Then I remembered that I'm not nearly smart enough to even have gotten the first 7...sigh
I'm surprised I haven't broken my monitor by tapping on cells in so many videos. lol
I think the much easier way to break the boxes 4&5 early on is to note that each one contains an 8 and a 9 arrow, so 17 per box (rather than 34 in total). Then the only permutation is a 1 in row 3 with 12346 and a 2 in row 3 with 12345. Then you note that if either the 5 or the 6 goes on the inside arrow in its box, it rules out all of the possibilities for itself in the other box by knights move. This shows that the outer arrows are 125 or 126, and the inner arrows are 134 and 234.
That was incredible. It is nearly 5 am and I’ve never been more impressed in my life. This looks so fun
I think it's fitting that the last thing Simon resolved on the puzzle was the thing he noticed and could have resolved at 1:01:50, when black and grey were forced into the same two spaces in box 3, giving the blue.
Talk about a beast of a puzzle, I managed to solve it in 87 minutes. Truly astonishing. I basically had to color the entire Sudoku, which was an extreme endeavor in and of itself, and let me tell you how glad I am over the multicolor option now, I managed to color the entire grid and then and only then could I put in any other digit than those pesky 7s.
This has got to be one of the very best puzzles I’ve ever seen. Just astonishing.
I say we save this one for the second cracking the cryptic book 😜
Weirdly, I found it far from being as difficult as some puzzles Simon crashes within 45 minutes and that I often can’t finish on my own. It "only" took me about 1h20 here.
19:40 - Simon gives up on Purples and Greens, but he could have isolated BOTH of them in Box 3. If you use both Knight's Move and traditional sudoku in Boxes 1 and 2, you can infer that the Greens and Purples MUST be in the top row, forcing them to Row 2 in Box 3, and the order is fixed once you figured out that Box 9's Greens are in Column 9.
Simon was uncharacteristically slow with his scanning today. Made me feel like a genius though, so I don’t mind
His scanning always goes downhill when the grid is covered in colours.
The colors really through him off. At the end, I could see the different color interactions while he was busy going through the numbers. He needed the numbers cleared up to see the final moves.
@@kindlin He starts , then colours, then sort of forgets what the colours were for. ( I would be making margin notes to help me If I were doing that )
1:00:37 you were so close!! Placing a purple in r9c6 (the arrows circle) creates a contradiction in box nine because it would place purple in box 7.
So the arrows eye is green
haha loved the "there's no one here... well apart from me" made me laugh out loud! I love Simon's humor!
I love that by now i have accepted „this must be 3, 4, or blue“ as a perfectly fine assessment of a situation!
At 1:05:50, you say "I don't think I could have [placed green in r2c8] earlier," when it fact you've been able to place that since 18:45! If you had looked at box 1 then, you could already tell that green was restricted to r1 by sudoku and knight's move, forcing the green domino in box 3 to be restricted to r2c8.
You know he is focused when he says "I haven't got a clue" instead of scooby doo.
I'm waiting for the day that Simon does a 'mic-drop' and just walks off.
The number of times this man has the square he is searching for highlighted will never cease to amaze me ^^
Hilarious puzzle! It can actually be completely resolved to uniquely colored pairs + 7s, at 1:22:55 when Simon makes the deduction for the 5, instead he could:
- eliminate 12 from r1c3 (cause it sees both r3c3 and r3c4), that makes r2c3 red.
- Deduce the coloring of r3c3 and r3c4 from red+yellow=7 (arrow in box 6) and hence 7+orange=pink (arrow in c1), which makes r3c4 orange (arrow in c4)
- Grey can be excluded from r6c9 because it sees both grey boxes in box9.
After these, the deduction for red being 5 allows going from 7s only to a complete grid in 10s. :)
34:43 each side (box4 + r3c3 or box5 + r3c4) has to sum up to 17 (a green and a purple) and 3 in row 3 would make the corresponding box a sum 14 in 5 cells (min 15). No need to try out combinations of 8 and 9.
When he announced the bonus video on Patreon. I half expected it to be the rest of this hour and a half movie.
62:33 for me. At the start, the 2 arrows in each box add to 17. So the parts inside can't both add to the same amount because the 2 digits on the arrows outside the boxes would have to also be the same. So one box used a 5 and the other used a 6. This means the 2 cells in the arrows outside the boxes are a 12 pair.
As soon as I see a ~90 min video I know I'm in for a treat! Thanks for the fun you provide every evening.
Really good cracking job!
The time you gave up with the 8-9-coloring I found that in box 1 the green cell eliminates green from row 2 and forces it into row 1. This helped a lot, as I could find all the green and most of the purple cells.
These long solves are the best mystery movies in cinema. Simon, even if you go down some blind alleys, we're enjoying the journey. These videos are better than anything Hollywood is producing now. Simon, I present to you my Oscar for best actor in a leading role. You deserve it as much as Anthony Hopkins.
1:11:26 when you place the 56 in box 9 you know it’s red. Effectively the blue pairs in cells 3 and 6 form an X-wing (knights move) so it has to be red
Or, more easily, there's already a blue in row 8
There is blue in box 7
Correct! (Correctamundo, a word I've never used before and hopefully never will again.) That was jolly difficult! I got very stuck on how to disambiguate anything after placing 7 7s. Turned out I was missing a couple of things and one was a kickself obvious one. Finally got there in 122 minutes having found the other 84 digits in the last few minutes which I presume was exactly as intended.
Excellent puzzle but so hard and a solve too long to be able to watch any of Simon's solve until tomorrow. Something to look forward to if the day allows.
Still, very pleased to have finished it at all. This morning brain wasn't up to managing an easy puzzle.
My first time shouting at Simon, I feel so accomplished. I'd been silently shouting about the greens in box 1 and purple in box 2 for over 30 minutes. I think I'm getting better at this whole sudoku thing. Thanks Simon.
You could fully color the grid. The coloring of the 1 and 2 in row 3 is determinable by using the 7-red-yellow arrow. Red+Yellow = 7, therefore Purple = 7 + Orange. Since Black and Grey are also 7, R3C4 is Orange, and R3C3 is then Yellow. That'll let you disambiguate the Reds, Oranges, and Yellows in the first 3 rows.
R6C9, before you started filling in digits, could be said to be not Grey because it'd eliminate the only options for Grey in box 9, which would have solved your Grey/Blue/Black sets in the last 3 columns.
Since there's not a pair for 7s, you'd be able to do the whole grid in just colors + 7s, and then finish the puzzle with the arrow in box 8 like you did in your solve.
At 20:00 You could have get the positions of green and purple in box 3 by using the knights move in box 1 you get the green digit in row 1 so it had to go into the middle of box 3. Same if you look on purple in box 2. Purple would be in row 1 so again in box 3 it would be in row 2. While the center is green and there's already a purple in column 9 it would go into row 2 column 7.
55:40
"What do we do now,[..] Can anyone tell me?"
- Well we could , if this was a live stream.
Maybe that's next. Can you imagine Simon or Mark solving while monitoring comments scrolling upwards in another window?
@@bearcubdaycare well I Imagine they mostly would look when they get stuck.
"What do we do now,[..] Can anyone tell me?"
- Well we could , if this was a live stream.
And if anyone would know that is! :D
@@Keyboardje well actually in this case at that point, I could have told to set green in box one, ore that R3C3 is yellow. But that is not the point. It is just fun to solve riddles with several people.
Also there are more Ideas to go around. And if no one has an idea about how to make progress, everyone feels better about the fact, that they have no clue.
@@MusikCassette
I know :D
Just my sense of humour. :)
Oh man, Simon not colouring that Red 56 in Box9 was enfuriating...
It was so, so long. It was colorable from the first time he wrote it down.
“You can’t put blue here because of the shenanigans in box 9.”
Some of the things he says are so gold
We have found the fourth man. (as a reference to the 4th cambridge spy which is just so of knowledge all round). Is this kind of language prevalent in the world Simon inhabits or all just sloshing around in his head ?
I know I'm late to the party so please forgive me if this has already been discussed, but an easier way to find the makeup of the four arrows, once you have proven that the circles have to be 8s and 9s, is to think of the numbers on the arrows in boxes 1 and 4. Those now have to sum up to 17, but the numbers in just box 4 are at least 15. That means there's no 3 in r3c3, and similarly r3c4. This proves you have 12346 in one of the boxes, meaning one of the 9 sums has to be 126. Then the other two 1s have to go to the 8 sums, therefore the other 9 is 234 and the two 8s are 134 and 125.
I’ve been an avid fan ever since the first miracle. This is one of my favorite solves!
I'm one hour into this and dreading Simon's heart dropping when he looks at the green 89 in box 4.
Edit: Blissful ignorance! Love it!
19:30 "I don't believe I've just ruled out purple from these 2 squares by knights move when there's a purple here"...
Simon, I had to chuckle at that because I had just ruled out purple in box 3 by exactly the same method!
Thanks to the Yellow + Red = 7 arrow on the right side, you could have figured out the colors of the 1&2 pairs in row 3 very early on.
Basically, If Red is low, Yellow is high, and vise versa. So Yellow is the same as Blue since Blue is the opposite of Red (high or low). Therefore thanks to Green in row 3 and its arrow, we know 1+2+Blue = Green, and thus Green, Yellow and Blue must all be either low (1,5,8) or high (2,6,9). So the Green in row 6 must have a Yellow on its arrow on row 3 regardles of its value.
At around 30:00, an easier way to notice that You can't have both 9 sums be 234 is that You've already deduced that the other arrows are 125, 134, and 234. We know that there must be three 1's, in all the arrows total, so the last sum must include a 1
At ~24:00 mark: A simpler way without diving into specific arrow compositions:
1. Note that the two arrows on c13 add up to 17, so r3c3 is at most 17-15=2; the same can se said for r3c4, so r3c34 is a 12 pair
2. Then the arrow-cells in boxes 4 and 5 have to be 12345 on one side and 12346 on the other
3. We claim that 5 and 6 cannot go in r5c34; WLOG let r5c3=5, then 5 cannot go in box 5 because the arrows in box 5 would be 12346
4. Therefore r5c34 is a 34 pair, and thus r4c34 sum to 7; if r4c34 is 16 or 25 then one of the arrows will add to 10 or 11, so r4c34 is also 34 pair
5. Therefore the arrows in c1 and c6 are 125 and 126, and we rule out 1234 from r5c8 and continue from there.
This was exactly what I did at that point in the solve.
Phew, that was insane. I didn't feel like going slowly at all, but it took me 1:40:43 regardless. I really got stuck at Simon's 54:24 for quite some time, amazing that he saw it so quickly. Beautiful but terribly hard puzzle! :)
16:38 "Doo doo"
Yeah, i am being a manchild but it still amused me.
Jeebus ...
I'm not sure where the line between 'long chain' and 'bifurcation' is, but I'm claiming a win on this one ... in a total time of 1:37:18. I ended up using uniqueness to figure some parts out (but going through to the inevitable dead-end to prove it to myself), but I don't believe I ever 'guessed' anything in my solve.
Insane puzzle!
Oh man I love it when we get another CTC: The Movie.
me, too. I have skipped the last 2-3 sudokus because they've been boringly short and fast. I only live to watch sudoku movies now. It's my only reason to live LOL
Here's another way to earlier see that r3c1-2 is a 12 pair, that is not containing a 3:
If there was a 3 in there, the minimum for that together with the five arrowed cells in the box below it would be 1+2+3+4+5+3 = 18, so the circled cells for those two arrows would have to be 9 and 9 which isn't possible (because then there is no place for a 9 in the block with the arrows).
I'm just intelligent enough to barely follow the thoughts explained to solve this monster. It is a delight to vicariously understand how a genius solves it and kind of know how he pulled it off
20:04 You just said that you couldn't do any more with the 89s. You haven't even placed the 89s in Box 3 yet. Given the totals of green and purple arrows are 17, and you have one green and and one purple arrow occupying 5 squares in both Box 4 and Box 5, the maximum number that can go in those arrows outside Boxes 4 and 5 are 1 and 2. This proves that the squares off the arrows not occupied by 89 must be a 67 and a 57 pair respectively. These pairs look into both r5c3 and r5c4, which remove 5, 6, and 7 from those squares, and with the 12 at the top of those central arrows, r5c3 and r5c4 are restricted to a 34 pair, which makes the final squares on those arrows a 34 pair as well.
Got this one in just under 3 hours. Feels good anytime I'm close to/ under 2x Simon's time! Very satisfying when I finally found how to collapse the pairs.
Nice to see Simon struggling as much with an 87 minute Sudoku as I do with a 27 minute Sudoku ^^ but it's getting better with the easier puzzles lately for me
Holy Toledo, what a puzzle. Took me 3:36 over 2 days. Constrained the arrow complex to a 34 sum and specific 8/9 combos, then started coloring some things, then everything. I got badly stuck at one point until I noted that r7c5 sees a 5/6 pair in r8, then wound up with nothing but colored pairs, placed 7s, and a single 1/2 "deadly Battenburg" in r2/r3. The 2 stray arrows resolved everything nicely. Now to watch Simon!
At 19:00 wishing he could hear me about the greens in box 3 🤣
1:05:00 it's still green box 1, 1:06:00 thank God.
Great puzzle! I ended up fully coloring every square in the grid before filling in any digits (aside from the 7’s). The multi-color feature was extremely useful on this puzzle. It would have been nearly impossible without it.
I did too, very colorful, but I was afraid there must be two solutions to the puzzle, because all I had was number pairs, except for the sevens. I had to watch Simon until he showed me that the red 56 in box 8 could not be a 6, due to causing both green & purple to be 9. Once I had that digit [5], the whole puzzle was solved in about a minute. 😍
Ok, I was thinking about what to watch on Netflix while having dinner... I think I know now! :P
An absolutely mind-boggling puzzle! I'm delighted to report that I managed to solve it in 58:23. Felt like a painter. 🎨
1:05:40 you could have deduced the "greens" in the box 1 to be in row 1, giving you a green in the center of box 3, very early on in the solve. I was really waiting for you to find that one :p. My solve also took forever, I finally resorted to uniqueness: The arrow in box 8 had to be the thing that resolved the puzzle, so it had to include a 3/4 or the entire 3/4 pattern would be impossible to disambiguate.
00:25:19
Simon: Oh, this is getting complicated now.
Me: Now?
1:10:55
I know this is a 5 or a 6 but I don’t think I know it‘s color. Blue 56 literally 4 cells left of it: „Am I a joke to you?“
Another Cracking the Cryptic: The Snyder Cut
The Simon Cut
Definitely found myself screaming at the computer, which I take as an achievement despite my neighbors' protesting
I love you Simon ... I play at 1.25x speed usually and every now and then I focus on the numbers and its as if C3PO is telling me how to solve the puzzle. cheers!
58:30 Simon has finally found the most complicated way of disambiguating purple and green... Which he could have done at 19:42 already had he not thought to himself "I can't see it so i won't bother looking"
........ ALSO ........ GREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN
At this point, every sentence Simon makes, i replace the keyword with GREEN.
I know it sounds crazy but I like these longer episodes.
Thanks so much for sticking with the coloring!
I love the way Simon's voice changes when he finally discovers something after being discouraged.
Enjoying every minute of this logic show. I could see some clues before Simon did but most of them either never or much later.
I like both, long didactic and short easier solutions. Keep going, please.
1:11:30 The 5/6 pair in box 9 is red by the blue 5/6 in box 7.
48:33 "they have to be three, four, and blue... because of sudoku"
Ah yes, the classic 3-4-blue triple, a staple in sudoku
Well done for keeping your energy up, your scanning does seem to show a bit of fatigue towards the end of these epics, giving some screen shouting opportunities !! Hurrah for the audience!
I'm terrified to just watch this. ;)
Starting at 1:01, the 3-4 combo in box 2 both see r3c7 by knights move and could have lead to a completely different chain of logic to solve the puzzle. Simon was looking for and finding similar cells for a while and never really looked at that one until the very end.
If you observe that {red + yellow = 7 = light gray + gray}, then that {7 + orange = purple} you can color the 12 pair in third row right at the beginning, making the whole stuff sligthly easier.