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 .....
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.
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.
i was wondering how did so many people solve the sudoku is such a short time since he uploaded it and then i realised that his solve checker box says 8.8 days ago and mine says 39.9.
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!
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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. 🩵💙
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.
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.
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 😊
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!!
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.
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.
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. 😊
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 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
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
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.
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 ❤)
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!
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 😊
@@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!)
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.
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
@@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!
I got Green = 4 slightly differently. If Green (2 or 4) is in r7c2 and r8c8/9, then it must be in r9c4/5/6. It can't be Red (c6) and none of the Blue cells can be 2, so Green must be 4.
I have a question possibly with an obvious answer: how could Simon know that blue and orange couldnt together form an 8cell cage using at least one cell in the third column?
The cage boundaries on the first orange square revealed - if blue and orange were the same cage, the orange square wouldn't have a boundary line running along its left side
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.
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.
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!
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 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 ;)
This is missing a rule that the cages must have a minimal circumference (or something like that), so R1C1 and R2C1 can be ruled out to be part of the same snake curling back in column 2... it's not obvious from the word "cage"... should it be?
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.
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.
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 find the early explanations excessive (which is fine -mileage will vary and you don't want people baffled by the early steps) but then later in the video there are often steps that I struggle to see how you've pulled a number from nowhere. It is reasonable to give less explanation later (you're often repeating a reasoning you've already explained) but I'd appreciate if it you could at least wave the mouse in the direction of the reason.
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.
That was definitely not an easy puzzle. And it's the first time I've ever solved one faster than Simon, I got the 3-9 pair in column 1 by the removal of 9 from R9C4 and it fell out from there.
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.
I apparently delayed too long and the kickstarter is now closed. 😢 can it be reopened for those of us who procrastinated? Also my wife missed your Santa hat.
At the 38 minute mark you are wrong about the uniqueness. In box 8, one is inside the blue cage and one is not. And that is how you can tell the apart.
