Like Simon said, I hope Klopp's there in his office watching CtC solve a puzzle made in tribute to him and his tenure. Thanks for showcasing the puzzle which meant a lot to me as a fellow Liverpool fan. YNWA :)
YNWA has surprisingly few syllables to work with but I've tried my best... When you walk through the solve Fill each Whisper line With neighbours at least five apart Into each silver square Place a 1 through 9 And each row, column, box, if you're smart The digits that dwell In each circled cell Make their circled tally known Solve on, solve on With hope in your heart And you'll never solve alone You'll never solve alone
😢 this poor box 8 was screaming for ages that it fills itself in through whisper and windoku easily, but Simon didn't listen... he didn't applyed the logic he, while in the run, then used in box 2... he penciled a 5 without seeing that there is already one in the Window... and it is so heartbreaking for this little Box 8 to be so harshly be swept unter the rug and isn't alowed to play with it's box friends.
i was screaming at the screen every time he said lets use windoku logic looking at poor little box 8, and then he just pulls out some complicated logic that just collapses the entire puzzle and i'm like O.O
3 times he wanted to do/was doing windoku logic, while hovering/selecting the top right 2 in b8 r7c6, wich was all on it's own. Poor little thing indeed 🤣 I love his solves. I would run myself head first into a wall for hours until he shows how it's done, but every time I manage to find some tiny bits before him, later on. It makes me smile 😊
The restricted location of 5s in box 8 immediately let's you know that 5 can't be in the circles, as it rules out a circled-5 for box 7. I imagine that's the expected method of determining the set of circled numbers.
@@johnh2052 At least 4 digits (4 circles in box 1) add to a total of 16. Three boxes are without digits, so 789 are impossible. 12346 is then the only way to fill the circles. At least that was my reasoning, haven't watched Simon yet.
Yes, ever since I started watching a year ago this channel has been the shelter from the storm…the storm of people shouting at me in content; of notifications lighting up my devices; of being overwhelmed in every part of my life. When I can end my day with Simon’s soft voice and pure joy and positivity, while taking comfort in the pure logic of the puzzle…it’s my shelter. Growing up, math was my shelter but I lost that as the years went by. In some ways, this channel has been like reuniting with that old friend. I guess the more concise way to put this is… the world never makes any sense, is negative, and is very loud. This channel is logic, positive, and soft spoken. And that means a lot to me.
Very interesting observation about attention spans and concentration, Simon. In 2020 I took a job I didn't really want as a sort of pandemic lifeboat, and it absolutely shredded my mental health. I finally quit and in August 2022 I started seeing a counsellor, Jill, who's done an amazing job of helping me put myself back together. One thing that Jill and I have discussed at length is the way in which sudoku puzzles and crosswords require me to use all of my brain, and when I'm solving a puzzle it drives away any anxiety and tension that I might be feeling, and allows my body and mind to relax. The only reason that I have those hobbies, and those de-stressing techniques, is because of all the time that you and Mark have taken to teach your audience how to tackle these puzzles, and I am forever grateful to the two of you, the wonderful setters, and the rest of the community. Right, that's the soppy bit out of the way. I'm going to have to be extra busy with the ban-hammer during the stream tonight to make up for it!
I've struggled with attention issues from when I was a young child, and was diagnosed with ADHD in 2nd grade. Sudoku, reading, and prayer are some of my coping mechanisms to reign in my attention for the exact reasons you described. It takes all of my focus and centers it, rather than having the mental space for a wandering mind. I still struggle with it, but these videos a refreshing change of pace.
Simon painstakingly explains how a 3-vertice GW line has limited options in Box 2, then proceeds to ignore the 3-vertice GW line in Box for the next 45 minutes. Priceless.
With the music starting at the end, I got thinking a puzzle might randomly start the song "losing my religion" mid solve and we all know Simon finds a 3 in the corner exactly before REM does the chorus
Two things I just learned. In the Y-shaped German whisper line you reduced the possibities to 1289, the same you could have done in the A-shaped line leading to 8-9 pair on the crossings of the line. Second thought is an extra regions in windoku. You figured out the green extra region, so you get three more (r234 r678 c234 c678) by symmetry. When you subtract all the eight regions from the whole puzzle, you get a ninth one with the leftovers. When you colour the grid, this leads to a nice pattern. In this sudoku it was no help, but maybe another time. I thought about it just while you finished the puzzle and spotted last 3 a few seconds before you got it. I mean the three in corner, three in the spotlight, losing its religion. Thanks for puzzle
I also spotted the ninth region and did find it useful in the solve. For instance, very early on, once you deduced that the circled digit below the A was a 6, you could eliminate 6 from the options for r1c1.
You'll never walk alone... Great puzzle! And it feels special (even though I do not follow football myself) to taste something like the love for their club that Liverpool fans actually have. Simon, I'll hope for you that whenever Liverpool will play a football match in the future and when a player with the number 3 on his back has to take a corner, the fans throughout the stadium will sing "That's 3 in the corner..."
Since I am in the US I don't really follow your football, but I can totally sympathize with a beloved leader of a favourite team leaving - and how sad it makes the true fans of that team feel. What a lovely puzzle and tribute, and the guitar as the puzzle closed was absolutely beautiful, Simon. The whole solve was interesting and fun, as always. Thanks! (And thanks to celery for yet another great puzzle)
What a pleasant surprise to learn Simon is a Liverpool guy. I picked my team at the mature age of 6 when our local soccer league had teams from Premier league and I was placed into the Liverpool squad. That's how your life is set on one beautiful path by complete happenstance. :) So sad to see Klopp leave, but happy to have experienced the time he was at the helm.
Simon, you’re absolutely right about sudoku’s training my brain to concentrate for longer periods of time. I try and do a sudoku every morning, and I try to avoid those TikTok like videos. Thank you for providing me with an opportunity to enjoyably, and consistently concentrate on a task.
I support Liverpool because the two nearest clubs to me were Liverpool and Everton. My dad supported Everton, and even at the age of about 3 or 4 I was a rebel, so I chose Liverpool. I'm glad I did, because the banter with my dad is one of the things I look back on with fondness. One of my fondest memories relating to Liverpool (apart from matches) was in 1977, when a group of us were queuing to get into the Edinburgh Tattoo, and in front of us there was a bunch of St Etienne supporters. Having just beaten them en route to winning the European Cup, of course we ribbed them and sang YNWA, but it was all in great humour. The love of football can transcend national boundaries. That was a great photo of Klopp & Shankly. I had grown up only knowing Shankly as the Liverpool manager, so it was a huge shock when he retired. Klopp leaving is almost as much of a shock. What they have in common, is that they've left the club in a great shape, both on and off the pitch. Thanks Jürgen for all you've done for the club, and good luck in whatever you go onto (unless you're managing a team that's playing Liverpool of course). You can instantly place 456 in R5 in box 5 and we can place the 6 in the circle. Row 6 has to have a 6, but it can't be in the bottom left windoku, so it only has two places, in C1/2. This means in box 6, it must be in R4. On the N and W, the non-line cells have to be 456, because only one of the monogamous digits can go on the line. This gives a 456 triple in C8, so R1C8 is 123, and the other two circles in the box are 46. A really nice tribute puzzle. I was too tired to do it justice. Watching your solve, I was spotting lots of things I'd missed (but so did you). I think an alert solver could probably race through this.
I'm a moderate Liverpool fan, not too enthusiastic from abroad, and I merely support another group of blokes from Liverpool, but a big Jürgen Klopp admirer. The solved puzzle, with the use of colouring, might be a nice painting on the wall as a tribute to him.
CTC has very recently got me into sudoku - and I've definitely found it a good exercise in concentrating and focus. I'd never really seen the appeal of sudoku before seeing you solve the variant sort. Very much appreciate the channel and the artform now!
I agree with your comments about using puzzles and your channel as a way to focus your attention for longer periods of time. For me it’s a welcome change from trying to do so much all at once. Thank you for the content
Der Simon, as a german football fan (green/white) I like to thank you for paying that kind of great respect to a fellow german. There are not so many things to be proud of at the moment, KLOPPO is one. BTW: my reason to pick Liverpool as my favourite team from the UK was not a colour. It was BRUCE GROBBELAAR.
Great tribute Celery, lovely puzzle, and I enjoyed the circle rule using footballs :D Simon I completely agree with what you said at the beginning. In a world where everyone is in a rush, and hundreds of different options to click on present themselves every day, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and mentally exhausted from it all. CtC is the perfect way to slow, down, gather your thoughts, focus, and relax while also doing something fun and challenging.
I feel ya, man. Wrexham is my club, and we've had a miracle revival in the past 3 years, thanks to the best owners in all of football, but we're still 3 whole leagues beneath you, so I generally root for you in Premier fixtures. When we reach the Premier, it'll be a different story. Up the town!
I think this is my first comment ever on the channel but as a Man United fan: I hate Liverpool, I like Jurgen Klopp very much and I love Cracking The Cryptic. Wishing JK all the best for the future. Greetings from Finland and I hope you all have a beautiful day ❤️
I never was into sports and it was strange for me how people were so fascinated about football matches. After I started watching your channel, I began to be able to predict possible paths of solving a puzzle and with the ability to form an opinion about how well a solver plays a puzzle, I am now able to understand people watching a football game (or any other competition) with fascination.
Wow. First time ever i solved a puzzle faster than Simon without any help (32:10h) Just 3 Jears ago, i never would be able to solve "not-standard-sudoku"-Puzzles at all. Thank you Simon for teaching me the wonderful world of Sudoku magic!
Lovely puzzle, although I must admit as an Arsenal supporter I'm glad we won't have to face a Klopp led side anymore as Liverpool have always given us fits since he's been in charge. I feel Liverpool supporters' anguish though as we recently went through the same losing a legend of a boss in Wenger.
It was actually delightful to hear simon talk about him being a liverpool fan. It's wonderful to hear those stories from people, especially when you hear the delight in their voice when they talk about them being younger.
Such a coincidence. Yesterday I thought about introducing German shout lines where neighbour digits have to have a difference lower than 5. And they would be red, of course.
You’ll never walk alone is one of my favorite songs! I would sing it to myself many times over the years when in need of encouragement. Lovely tribute! Lovely guitar background! I hope the subject of this tribute sees this!
I finished in 54 minutes. This was a fantastic puzzle that had some really cool geometry with the german whispers. I had done a puzzle recently that also utilized circles that added up to 16, so it was quick work for me to see that it must be five digits in those circles. Very cool pathway. Great Puzzle!
33:50 alternate way {456} are restricted to 4 cells in box 6, of which TWO must be in col 8. this creates a {456} triple in col 8, which works with the circles in box 3 to remove one of the 4 cells from the previous step. now you have a {456} triple in row 4, which works with the 2 known low digits in box 5 to fix the polarity in box 4.
i had a really beautiful way of telling which color was high and which was low at 33:45. If you look at row 4, it has 2 lows in the circles of box 5 and 3 pink cells. this means pink can't be high
5:00 absolutely Simon! I am a 17 year old boy struggling greatly with paying attention for a long time and having a clear mind because of all the social media platforms we have today. Your video’s always help me to end the day positively and well-rested so I can fall asleep afterwards nicely. Thank you for your fantastic content everyday and never quit♥️ As a Manchester United fan I am a little disappointed though😉
I'm in Boston, so Liverpool is sort of my own local Premier League team -- the current ownership group is based here (and also owns the Red Sox, our baseball team; and the leader of the group is also publisher of our local newspaper). Plus the coach of our local NFL team has just stepped down after 24 years with the club (that's the polite version of the story). Plus the coach of our actual local soccer team, in MLS, also left relatively recently. So I get how you're feeling, Simon. 😿 We take sports seriously around here! (Or some of us do anyway.) I remember a zillion years ago when Bob Cousy retired -- one of the greatest basketball players ever to lace 'em up, and one of the legendary figures of the legendary years of the Boston Celtics. My mother was inconsolable: she cried for days. So the Liverpool fans' reaction to Klopp's departure makes entire sense to me. YNWA, indeed.
Re: CtC and attention spans! I've had pretty disruptive ADHD my entire life, and I watch CtC every night to fall asleep because it's the perfect middle ground for my mangled attention span lol. I enjoy puzzles, so it keeps my mind too occupied to wander in five million directions, but I can't 100% fully focus on it because it's so long and very calm in energy, so I can still manage to fall asleep at some point. I usually start off very engaged in every step and then just slowly drift off once the pattern has become fairly clear. It's very relaxing! And if I fell asleep too early or I particularly enjoyed the puzzle and don't want to miss anything I come back to watch the rest of the solve in the morning! :D
Whoa, I made it all the way through this one without help! 😄 33:45 for my time (conflict checker off), really nice puzzle, though a bit tricky at times. Props to Celery for this wonderful puzzle!
I broke the polarity of N&W in a different way. After placing 5 in box 4, Simon had 3 purple cells in r4 that couldn't possibly be low with the footballs without repeating a digit.
English football still holds a special place for me. As a child in Finland in the 1980s, the Saturday afternoon English league game was pretty much the only football available on TV. Liverpool had a lot of Finnish fans, even before Sami Hyypiä played there. I’m not a Liverpool fan myself, but they’re a fine team, and I can empathize with Simon and Celery. Solving time 20:42. Figuring out which numbers go into the footballs was really nice, often it’s easier than this. And the whisper line interactions and windoku “invisible regions” were brilliant.
About the concentration: I have ADHD, so concetrating on something at all is quite a big issue for me. The only reason I still have a job now is because when I like the task (and I do like my work most of the times) I'm able to enter the hyperfocus mode, where I don't notice anything, except for the task I'm doing (including the basic human needs, as eating, sleeping, going to toilet, etc. Just so nobody thinks hyperfocus is something great). But it's really exhausting, so I find short videos a nice way to relax the brain. Just need to not spend all day watching them, which is sometimes also quite hard, because of ADHD 😅
New to anything beyond regular sudoku but as this seemed to have lots of either/or method to it I thought I'd give it a go. I've tried others before and quickly given up but I've been watching the back catalogue of CtC recently and must be learning something. It took me 2 evenings and almost 4 hours but I completed my first puzzle! I only got majorly stuck once where I had to check and see I was wrong and used undo to get me back to a point where I could try again, but I'm still well chuffed! So thank you for all my new found knowledge!
Great puzzle. I am super happy that I was able to do it! 😀 So this is the reason why you like Liverpool! When I was a kid I did not pay attention to football. But when I was a teen I do start to watch some matches (did not remember the reason to) and liked Barcelona. Most because of Messi, of course 😅, but I started to like the club and even after he saddly leave us I am still supporting the team (hard time now, but it is ok!). I still follow Messi to see how he is going (as he is my favorite player). Some time later I started to watch Premier League, and did this most because of Guardiola, so I like Man City because of him and KDB. Now City was a lot of football players that I like too! I not a fan of Liverpool, specially after Liverpool 4 x 0 Barcelona 😅, but more because you guys are the only ones fighting with City. But it is very sad for a PL fan that Klopp is going away, City vs Liverpool is the match that I am most looking forward to in PL. But it must be hard to be in his spot. Anyway, luck for you guys! Every time the fans chant YNWA in Anfield give me chills. 😁 Nice to hear that Simon go to the stadiums. Maybe you watched the Istanbul miracle live? 🤔
MY suggestion to start this puzzle is quite the opposite of simon's: in "settings", turn "hide colours" ON, in order to remove the grey boxes. replace them with an outline. you will need colours for other purposes, and a bland grid is easier to work on. the "windoku trick" should only be used as a last resort, for similar reasons. it isn't actually needed in this puzzle.
Finished in 33:59. Battled with it for a while, but TOTALLY forgot about the additional regions. Once I remembered that, I finished in less than 2 minutes more. Probably would have finished in half the total time if I hadn't forgotten that. Beautiful puzzle! Being an American and not much interested in Soccer (football!), I've never heard of Jurgen Klopp, but I loved the puzzle!
This one took me a while (58:53), but despite the long solve, I found this very doable for me. Each step flowed nicely from the last and I never felt completely stuck.
1:21:45 - I was so tempted to make an assumption on the N & W whisper lines but I’m glad I didn’t as I finally got the pair that disambiguated it all. Surprisingly challenging given the 4 extra regions, but another lovely puzzle.
Not the biggest football fan as an American (though I do enjoy when I can tune in here and there), though my baseball team’s manager has just retired after this past season following 11 years and a huge impact on the franchise. I am very much looking forward to what’s next for the team but will miss Tito dearly. Best wishes to Liverpool in finishing the season well and for the next era of their club.
Lifelong die-hard Boston Red Sox fan here ... we all felt the same way when the Sox left Mookie Betts go - a generational talent who won us a World Series Championship and was the face of the franchise. And they let him go. .... Oh yeah - same ownership as Liverpool
A thought for future solves, if it becomes necessary to use shading in a windoku puzzle it might be useful to outline the windows with a minimally obstructive pen tool color, might make it easier to remember to scan for window logic (which I do think was hampered in this solve by the windows blending in with the option shading)
That was what I did, draw a grey box around the outside of each window, because I found that I was losing the grey shading as I was colouring cells on the whispers, and it definitely helped with scanning (and just remembering that the windows were there!)
Windoku combined with a bit of SET theory tells us that the 9 cells in r159 c159 form a set of the digits 1-9. So placing the 6 in r9c5 rules out the 6 in r1c1.
This is a lovely puzzle! The combination of counting circle rules and windoku led to some nice logic tricks. My time today was 24:44, solver number 599. [Edit] While watching Simon's solve, I came to discover that I made a lucky mistake. I didn't consider there being a 5 in circles, because I thought the option that Simon was tempted to use at about 17:15 in the video was the only one that would work. Simon went on to disprove the possibility of a 5 in short order, but I skipped that step. This could have cost me dearly in being able to finish the puzzle if I'd been wrong, so I feel fortunate that I got the right answer by mistake. Hopefully this will remind me to be more careful in future puzzles.
26:54 finish. The high/low parity of the NW lines resolved early enough that I decided to color the hidden extra regions instead of the whispers. This helped to move things along, and it was a nice solve.
I remember you u describing the Windowku trick years and years ago. I never thought about it but is it the first mainstream example of set theory on display? Set theory is pretty well known these days but back when you first described the trick I don't think I even knew what it was. I am going to go track down that video and see how you described it back then.
Puzzles are not for everyone, but I agree that, at least for me, the sensation of concentrating on a puzzle does make me feel as though the world is being put in order. Our brains are indeed designed to solve problems, but they are also designed to adapt to their environment. This latter is what the 'attention economy' is leveraging. Social media COULD exploit our desire to solve problems, but that is far more difficult and far less cost effective than simply enticing us to jump from one short video to another like miserable little FOMO-riddled capuchin monkeys.
38:38 with a peak at the video. I broke it having two 9's in row 3, looked and saw that my thinking was that a 7 had to be next to BOTH 1 and 2 on the lines, not 1 or 2, which ruined my pencil marking early on. Super impressed that thinking about the 46 pairs was how I had to start, was thinking it would be the 5's at first.
49 minutes. I found an easier way to deduce the high and low digits on the N (Box 4) and W (Box 6) whisper lines. Row 4 had three purple cells in Boxes 4 and 6, and two low digits in Box 5. Therefore, purple couldn't be low.
Regarding what you said about increasingly more people having shortened attention spans. This is of interest for me personally, I have a friend who've been complaining that TikTok fries his brain, leading to lethargy, depression and addiction. Human brains simple arent made for it. So I've recommended him to try consuming "slower" forms of media, such reading or movies, but even watching CtC or solving puzzles should also be beneficial.
Row 4: the 123s in box 5 combined with knowing either in box 4 or in box 6 there must be two more low digts on the german whispers line. This rules the 4 out of r4c8. So at 33:40 you know purple is high.
