Justin here, thank you so much for solving my puzzle! I’ve been watching the channel and solving the puzzles you’ve been posting for a few years now. I tried my hand at setting a couple of years ago but no one solved them and I kind of gave up. A few months ago, through solving, I ended up getting acquainted with a number of people (including Marty sears, ViKingPrime, juggler, abdulthekiller, and thepedallingpianist) who have been so supportive that I ended up giving it another go and I’m so glad that I have. It’s been very rewarding and the sudoku community (whose growth I think is indebted in no small part to this channel) has just been absolutely lovely to be a part of. Thanks again!
@@puzzlepusher Are the cage colors to... (spaces added to avoid spoilers) indicate the suggested solve path? You start with the warmer colors and move on to the cooler colors?
@@Feegles The cages in this puzzle aren’t all normal cages. 11 here means either that the sum is 11 OR that there’s “one 1” in the cage. Read the rules for more details
This is one of the most long-awaited, deserving debuts; Justin's puzzles have all been brilliant and if you enjoyed this I'd highly recommend looking up the rest of their catalogue. This one in particular is such a highlight, good, clean logic, beautiful layout and a fun title to boot.
Made me very happy to see this this pop up on my RU-vid this evening. Loved this puzzle - a much deserved debut for Justin. I too was bemused by the 13 cage at first and loved its use for disambiguating at the end - brilliant and fun idea for an ending! The subtle use of colour to guide you through was a lovely touch too. I feel like you would subconsciously notice it and find it useful, even if you didn’t consciously realise what was going on 🌈
With a little help from Simon in the beginning, I manged to finish this sudoku in about 1 hour. I was a little overwhelmed by the rules at first, but once I got them it was really fun to solve this puzzle. Many thanks to Simon and Mark for all the wonderful videos, to the setters for making these great puzzles and also to the lovely community. Since about a year this channel has become a place of peace and quiet for me 😊
20:49 I feel like Simon comes so close to this here-pretty sure r5c7 cannot be a 7. If it is the 21 cage cannot be look-say any more, since that would need two 1s in box 5, but it also can't be a killer because it would need 14 in five cells, but the triangular number for five is 15...
Something you said in your introduction clicked with me. Solving puzzles provides a sense of absolute certainty, but there are some people around who are clearly looking elsewhere for absolute certainty in their lives -- and they aren't the sort of people I'd associate with puzzle-solving .....
He started identifying two of the three 24 cages had to be real cages with the digits 7 8 9, and I expected him to immediately fill in the topmost cage as one of them... but he didn't
Yeah, that's where I started (and then observing that the digits from those cages in box 5 are a 47 pair), which I found a more useful start. I didn't get a good time, but that was largely because my brain insisted on my first two attempts that the 11 cages couldn't be look-and-say cages because putting a 1 in them meant we couldn't get to the 11 total.... I didn't have that problem parsing any other cages but for some reason apparently the 11 cages were special in my head.
Rules: 04:46 Let's Get Cracking: 06:41 Simon's time: 32m44s Puzzle Solved: 39:25 What about this video's Top Tier Simarkisms?! The Secret: 5x (36:15, 36:21, 36:29, 39:52, 39:55) Bobbins: 1x (34:19) Three In the Corner: 1x (39:14) Chocolate Teapot: 1x (16:53) And how about this video's Simarkisms?! Beautiful: 11x (00:51, 11:49, 14:46, 15:51, 29:04, 31:06, 32:33, 38:10, 38:20, 39:55, 39:55) Ah: 9x (11:56, 15:26, 19:38, 22:47, 25:30, 25:35, 27:06, 37:20, 37:20) By Sudoku: 8x (07:30, 15:20, 18:53, 19:48, 23:54, 26:02, 28:04, 39:04) Hang On: 7x (15:07, 17:37, 19:42, 20:51, 24:37, 24:45, 25:15) Nature: 5x (18:12, 18:40, 29:12, 29:40, 30:22) Obviously: 3x (13:14, 22:05, 28:55) Whoopsie: 3x (17:51, 17:55, 23:50) Fabulous: 3x (00:33, 00:33, 04:46) Goodness: 2x (00:23, 00:35) Sorry: 2x (17:04, 22:22) Clever: 2x (11:16, 37:17) Lovely: 2x (39:23, 39:26) Bizarre: 2x (11:02, 12:39) Good Grief: 1x (29:04) Naked Single: 1x (24:14) The Answer is: 1x (13:01) I Have no Clue: 1x (21:50) Stuck: 1x (26:42) Brilliant: 1x (04:07) Elegant: 1x (11:19) First Digit: 1x (13:38) Shouting: 1x (04:24) Of All Things: 1x (33:45) Surely: 1x (10:04) In Fact: 1x (02:07) Box Thingy: 1x (30:40) Marries Up: 1x (30:17) Wow: 1x (39:23) Pencil Mark/mark: 1x (13:49) That should be a Something: 1x (35:48) Cake!: 1x (04:13) Triangular Number: 1x (07:14) Weird: 1x (06:07) Most popular number(>9) and digit this video: Twelve (13 mentions) One (77 mentions) Antithesis Battles: Column (14) - Row (10) 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!
@@JalebJay so happy you noticed this! I really tried to make nesting and repetition themes in this puzzle but the latter is certainly a fine line to walk when you also want to keep people interested in a puzzle for 81 digits 😀
The "look-and-say" rule relates to one of my favorite novelty integer sequences, OEIS A005150: 1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221... (the zeroth term is "1" and each subsequent term is just the look-and-say of the previous term, so "one one; two ones; one two, one one; one one, one two, two ones...")
Except... it's 4 ones and 2 twos. This is the problem with that "puzzle" it can be interpreted in different ways; that even if we ignore the syntax problem (numbers become pluralized).
This one took me a while, but I really enjoyed it! The most satisfying deductions where the 6 and 8 in c1, where you could determine that making the cage into _either_ a killer _or_ a say-what-you-see would require the same digit 😎
Definitely. When the colours are just random and don't add anything (and can't be turned off), they just get in the way and mean we can't use colour shading ourselves to keep track of cages that we've determined have to be killer or say-what-you-see cages.
@@thescrewfly As a solver, a hidden clue that is not even hinted at (and in fact is explicitly denied, as the rules say that the colours are purely for decoration) is of no use or interest. It's a great puzzle on its own merit, the colours were more of a hindrance than a help, and to be honest I would prefer not to have that kind of guide to the solve path if it isn't strictly needed.
I usually don't like puzzles with cages only, since it often means that they rely heavily on math, and I prefer logic puzzles. This was a nice surprise: it has SOME math, but it almost felt like baby math, and the solution is almost all logic (with a brilliant and natural flow to it).
The 24 cages had to be in different orientations, because there can only be three instances of either 7, 8, or 9 in each column. This reduced 4 in box 5 to r4c4 and r6c4. I love it when there's more than 1 way to break into a sudoku!
It amazes me that a brilliant solver like Simon almost always stops half-way through a chain of sudoku solves to think about something else that he thinks he might have spotted. Like at around 23 minutes in this video where the 8-9 in R3C3 and C4 clearly shows that there is no 8 in R9C3, but he still starts looking at 8's in C6 instead.
The break-in here is so obvious it hurts (three 24 cages!!!), and combined with the 17s at that... covering all the bases, the 17s have either a 7 or an 89 pair which disambiguate the 24 cages! Completed in 22m17s.
Lovely solving from you Simon!! Were you thinking of Derektionary of coming up with Look n Say cages? I believe he was the inventor or one of the very first to use it early on. Great debut from you Justin!!
I think I solved this with one less restriction, let me explain!! I'm a bit rusty at sudoku solving lately, so I just started solving, and in my mind (but not the rules) you could repeat numbers in the killer cages... So... it took me a while, but even if you ALLOW the repetition of numbers in killer cages, I believe this puzzle has just one solution! This blew my mind when I watched the video after, because I spent some time looking into if you could, say, put 2 9's into the 24 cages, but even allowing for my lapse of rule-reading, you actually cant.
I solved the entire puzzle with this fake rule (or lack of rule) all the time allowing duplicate digits in killer cages. I believe there is only one way of solving it, and it works.
That’s pretty amazing. I guess using 2 9s on a 24 cage would break another 24 cage (and 888 doesn’t work) so it’s not too surprising but definitely would make it much harder to see the path. Well done!
Imagining a puzzle with this ruleset except it's "exactly one of..." (instead of "or both") and the solve relies on avoiding having certain cages satisfy both rules...
Mark did a puzzle like that a few weeks ago (I think it was Star Crossed Sandwiches or something like that, I think the thumbnail had Star Wars characters). In it, the clues on the outside were either X-sums or sandwich sums, but not both, and the finishing move to fix a deadly pattern was to see that one option satisfied both the X-sum and sandwich sum clue and was therefore incorrect, whereas the other option satisfied only one clue.
It took a LOT of thinking and one slip up where I incorrectly assumed the 16 cage in the top left was a both-cage leading to issues, but I got it done in 01:08:46. Brilliant puzzle.
Did this one mostly on my own (had done the math that the 12 cage in box 9 could only be a 57 or a 2, but didn't recognize that the smaller 12 cage in box 7 had the same limitations.) Really loved the 6 in box1 and the 8 in box 4. Also did my solve in a pretty different order than Simon, so I think there were many different ways this could have been solved.
Finished in 28:55. I made one bad assumption, but fortunately, it lead to a dead end fairly quickly, so I was able to backtrace and fix it. Fun puzzle!
Took me a little over an hour to solve. I was stuck for at least 10 minutes near the end because I thought I had ended up in a deadly pattern. I didn't notice the 13- cage preventing a second 3 in it. It's funny how Simon found it right away
Oh interesting. Once I determined it couldn't be a killer I pencil marked the options so that I wouldn't accidentally consider a 3 in it, but it felt like overkill since there were still a decent number of options and I wasn't sure if I needed to be concerned about it.
I also took a long time to spot the 13 constraint. Very clever, especially since the puzzle hasn't used that kind of restriction up to that point, so you're not primed for it and need to think of one last thing to finish it off.
I impressed myself today… correctly guessed the ruleset from the title. Don't think I have time to solve it (beyond the obvious quadruple in c4), so will watch the video at 2× instead
13:50 I pencilmarked the two 12-cages as 257A. Similarly, when I didn't know which of two 24-cages was 789 and 44X, I centermarked 4789 and 789X. Right at the end, where I had an apparent choice of summing the 19-cage to 19 or having a 9 inside, I was stuck for the longest time looking for something that I missed. They both seemed to work, and the 9-inside apparently had multiple solutions. Then I remembered that the 13-cage had exactly one 3, and that resolved it. (The 19-cage sums to 19.)
@10:00 you can place 789 in the topmost of these three cages - if it were the Look and Say cage with two 4's, then you would have four of 789 in row 3, and only two of 789 in row 4.
I spent about 2 hours in total on two solve attempts, as I really wanted to solve this. But I kept painting myself into corners with errors so I gave up. A sad defeat as I liked the logic of this puzzle.
I finished in 73 minutes. This was an incredible work of geometry in a sudoku grid. Everything flowed so well from those three 24 cages and was incredible to see. I forgot near the end that a cage was capable of both types and thought I had broken the 18 cage in the 26 cage. Great Puzzle!
(At the time I'd watching/doing this puzzle, there are >150 comments. Not sure anyone mentioned-- the killer cage calculator doesn't work in this puzzle. Must be the formatting. I really like the calculator because I don't want to be bogged down with math, which I might get wrong. I just want to do the puzzle. Similarly, I do use the conflict checker for sake of time. I want to enjoy the puzzle for what it is, not have to worry about incorrect scanning.)
This is also a play on the Xibit meme, which goes, "Yo dawg, I heard you like X, so I put X in your X, so you can X while you X." In this case denoting cages within cages.
There is a slight English issue with the ruleset, as (or both) should not be written that way as it is not a further explanation of a rule, but instead a rule needed for the ruleset to work. It should be something like Each cage in the grid is either or both...
I don't see any problem with it as written. It's clear and violates no strictly necessary grammatical rules. (Although I suppose I can only speak for American English.)
@@katiekawaii Parentheses normally are not used like that, Brackets would be better. You are altering the rule, not clarifying or describing the rule. Think of parenthetical expressions as a friend whispering in your ear during a movie. If you can still understand the movie, it is fine to use parentheses. In this case, you can't, so you should not use parentheses.
With the terrible new layout of youtube I can't click on the link below eacause it isn't below anymore. It should pop up on the right. But it doesn't ! All the explanations to the clip aren't shown anymore and by no means I manage to make them appear. I'm lost. Could anybody help me?
There’s something wrong with the puzzle on my end. 3 cages are missing their clue number. I only know the number from the video. The purple 26 cage, the blue 18 cage within it, and the little blue 12 cage in box 5
@@Daymickey I had the same problem, refreshing helped. But I still have the problem that digits that I’ve put in sometimes disappear from cells. The sudokupad seems to have issues at the moment
As we solve the grid cell be cell, we find cages colored pastel. Now some of them are killer. Some indicate filler. But which is which? How the heck do I kn... er... I mean... ...who can tell?
I don't get why he was confused at the 13 cages's existence, it's there in the same way all the other cages are there. Once he knows R7C7 is a 3, the logic of that cage is it can't be a killer cage, because the other digits can't add up to 10. I could see his point if the cage had zero logic attached to it.
He got the 3 in r7c6 by normal sudoku. He didn't use the cage. So the cage appeared to be not needed, since it looked like it was just automatically satisfied. He would have got that 3 even if the cage didn't exist. He correctly worked out the only reason for having that cage would be to exclude a second 3 from it.
@@RichSmith77 Yes, but by getting the 3 via normal sudoku, this then determined the make up of the cage which is why it was there. Had he still been able to make 10 in the other two digits, I'd have seen the point.
@@StewartyMac It makes no difference if you can make 10 with the other digits, though. The cage appears to satisfy the look-and-say condition by having a 3 in it. Cages can obey one condition, or both. So by obeying one condition (look-and-say), it makes no difference whether it also sums to 13 or doesn't. That's why the cage may appear to be redundant. Except it excludes there being a second 3 in the cage. It's a unique cage in the puzzle because it's the only one that's used this particular way.
@@Archik4Ah. I see. To be fair to Simon, he only knew the 21 cage needed two 1's after he put the 6 in at 22:45, and I strongly suspect that was what he was referring to when he said "Now there are other things going on..." but he chose to see if he "...might do some more sudoku, so give me a second" first. He came back to explain the line he'd already seen at 23:25, which sorted the 1 and 7 in box 6. I don't feel like it's something Simon missed. He just delayed exploring it while looking for other things first, which is something Simon often seems to do and I find fascinating. 🙂
Dear setters: please stop using decorative colors for stuff! In this case, I really wanted to color a cage one color if it was a killer and another if it was a look-and-see but the colored cages made that annoying.
