Starbattle: The Puzzle That Should Be Famous

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Today's puzzle sees us return to one of our favourite logic problems, the Starbattle! This is called Skirmish In The Horsehead Nebula and it's by Oyvind Thorsby. You can play it at either of the links below (the links use slightly different black lines so we've included both in case one is clearer than the other on your device):
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Rules:
Place three stars in each row/column/region such that no two stars touch each other, even diagonally.
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▶ABOUT US◀
Hi! We're Simon Anthony and Mark Goodliffe, two of the UK's most enthusiastic puzzle solvers. We have both represented the UK at the World Sudoku Championships and the World Puzzle Championships.
Thank you for watching!
Simon and Mark

Опубликовано:

25 янв 2021

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Комментарии : 209

@Zach010ROBLOX 3 года назад

Loved the bit around 28 minutes where He hovers over the red region near column six and says he's looking for something obvious and then leaves. xD

@felipevasconcelos6736 3 года назад

After 20 minutes of seeing him spot the wildest of the constraints I couldn’t even dream of, those moments are great for my self-esteem.

@DoodleNoodle129 3 года назад

@@felipevasconcelos6736 he then ruins it all by saying that a puzzle where I got nothing on for an hour is “so far not that hard”

@ChrisHallas 3 года назад

I think it's safe to chalk up "I don't even know what Gonzo is, but this is definitely green!" to my 'Sentence I won't hear again for a while' list.

@gqsnowman 3 года назад

I have never seen this style of puzzle before and I am INSTANTLY in love with it. This is awesome.

@jesszendrex2151 3 года назад

"Gonzo has now become incredibly constrained" well, didn't know muppets were kinky like that

@ryaneakins7269 3 года назад

Watch "Muppet Treasure Island". Gonzo definitely is.

@lewsouth1539 3 года назад

That's nothing. Gonzo has a chicken fetish!

@accipiterignitus5123 3 года назад

28:57

@JakeRowland337 3 года назад

29:10 "Just having a stare to see if there's anything really obvious" *mouse is hovering over a star that isn't ringed in green*

@Zacht1980 3 года назад

29:10 - "I'm just having a stare, to see if I can see anything really obvious." He says while hovering the cursor millimeters from an obvious star.

@topilinkala1594 Год назад

It seems that it is Simons trademark not to look where his cursor is. I've seen it in so many videos hovering over "the answer" which he does not see.

@joeltimonen8268 3 года назад

17:28 A snail, an F that's been turned around and plonked on its side, and a squiggle. The perfect trio!

@Omeganitros 3 года назад

Yoooooo Oyvind Thorsby!!! So glad he’s still around, I love his comics

@tcarni21 3 года назад

Can we please have an option in the software to make the grid lines lighter or the border lines thicker? Its kinda hard for me to see where the regions are...

@dismalfailure44 3 года назад

I bring news from the discord: 6:44 for Freddie

@livedandletdie 3 года назад

That's insane... I did it in just under an hour. And I like Star Battles...

@alvaropallete 3 года назад

maybe he already did it before 🤷‍♂️

@ethanstrumwasser8798 3 года назад

@@alvaropallete nope! he's just very fast at puzzles

@ericpraline1302 3 года назад

That is completely incomprehensible. I takes me that long just to do the colouring, which perhaps he omits.

@lindaisyoutubing 3 года назад

Wow, I don’t suppose there’s a video of his solve anywhere?

@zvoniimiir 3 года назад

Could you add the lines in a different color? It's very hard to see them clearly

@fresnik 3 года назад

On a similar note it can sometimes be hard to differentiate normal lines from thick lines, especially when cells are selected.

@S_Black 3 года назад

There is a setting in the app about drawing dark outlines. He just needs to turn that off. Then the overall region is marked, but it doesn't change the internal cells

@MissMaraJoy 3 года назад

28:56 "Gonzo has now become incredibly constrained" The phrases that arise from these videos never cease to amuse me :-)

@Happyjew666 3 года назад

25:36 "I don't know what even Gonzo is." Per Gonzo himself, he is a whatever.

@Varksterable 3 года назад

Gonzo. Almost an aardvark. In a weird way. Best of two worlds.

@rowkingsbury945 3 года назад

I believe gonzo is a whatever

@Varksterable 3 года назад

@@rowkingsbury945 He certainly is. Probably. #gonzofan

@Tmanfreit 3 года назад

This took me 90 minutes, but it was a lot of fun for my first ever Star Battle puzzle!

@mininewman92 3 года назад

I discovered your channel a few weeks back by a random RU-vid suggestion and I'm hooked! Alternative title for this one; "Sudoku wizard plays minesweeper by colouring in"

@t71024 3 года назад

Thank you CtC for publishing two puzzles today which require more common geometric intuition than the relatively abstract techniques of regular sudoku. Don't get me wrong, I love plain old sudoku and all the variants shown here regularly. But these geometry puzzles are a good addition to the mix. Can't hardly wait for the next snake!

@paulnieuwkamp8067 3 года назад

I love how you guys keep introducing me to new types of puzzles. I've been hooked to Slitherlink for a few months now, and this looks like a lot of fun too.

@thejeqff 3 года назад

Enjoy watching the alternative "pencil puzzles" and star battles are always fun. This was a good one.

@Pseudoscorpion14 3 года назад

Oyvind Thorsby? Like, the webcomic author? Oh, I've gotta see this.

@Scanlaid 3 года назад

Gonzo 😂. Never change, Simon. You are a treasure.

@mttimlin 3 года назад

I've been waiting for starbattle puzzles since I found this channel, so glad to see it!

@TheMitcher 3 года назад

I've been really enjoying these puzzles through an app named Parks (a different formulation of the puzzle, effectively the same thing but with trees rather than stars). Really good to see them on the channel, hope you do more!

@JohannesVerelst 3 года назад

Great to see you do these kinds of logic puzzles on the channel Simon! Star Battle has always been a favorite of mine, I believe it’s originally a concept by the late Hns Eendebak, who was the chief editor of the logic puzzles magazine ‘Breinbrekers’ that I had a subscription of as a teenager (over more than 20 years ago :-). Great to see his puzzle type here, and to learn a few tricks from you on how to solve them quickly!

@BaalRoi 3 года назад

Hey there :) Been following the channel for some time! love to see you crack these puzzles, but just wanted to give a suggestion if possible. I'm color blind and by min 11:10 when you say you put yellow on the top I can't differentiate it from the green :X As well as purple and blue are too similar most of the time in your videos. If maybe you could adjust the colors to be more vivid, or have slightly different hues it would be great! :)

@billbliss7407 3 года назад

I really enjoy seeing these different kind of puzzles once in a while!

@peterhackett3815 3 года назад

Simon's clothing choice matches his colouring choice for the 2x2rule to help solve

@andrewgrant6516 3 года назад

Simon wears red and blue to make it harder to spot his Spider-Man costume underneath. Crime never sleeps!

@mritty115 3 года назад

That was a really fun kind of puzzle, I'd enjoy seeing more of these on the channel every so often.

@ThereIsAnExtension2UndoHandles 3 года назад

We should start keeping a list of CTC 'guest stars' like Gonzo and Kingsman

@ralfrussel1950 3 года назад

The mandalorian

@jamesrempel8522 3 года назад

This channel is begging for a user-curated wiki tbh.

@ethanstrumwasser8798 3 года назад

@@jamesrempel8522 someone already made one but it’s very inactive

@PelicanOfDeath 3 года назад

25:35 IIRC Gonzo is canonically named a "Whatever".

@LednacekZ 3 года назад

at 18:52 you made a choice to split the right side to groups of 1,4,3 from top to bottom and that gave you single cell at the top. Why can't you split it to 3,4,1 which would give you single at the bottom? Is there some rule you followed?

@shadyamigo 3 года назад

I was wondering the same

@TheokeS85 3 года назад

No, there is no rule to be followed. If you split up 3, 4, 1, the bottom left is automatically a star and following the logic, so is top right. End result is the same and it is everywhere else you have a choice like that.

@shadyamigo 3 года назад

@@TheokeS85 thanks i see now as either way it generates the same domino in the middle

@bluji1250 3 года назад

Seeing puzzles other than Sudokus is always a breath of fresh air! This was a really cool SB with a nice, smoothly proceeding solve.

@donofmath248 3 года назад

Always love when you do these more spatial puzzles; thanks so much for sharing!

@Anne_Mahoney 3 года назад

Different strokes for different folks -- I find the spatial puzzles almost incomprehensible. Maybe that's why I never became a good chess player. Give me a nice sudoku variant: maybe a couple of killer cages, a thermo here or there, something like that, and I'm content.

@halynamyers8664 3 года назад

Never seen a puzzle like this, what a fabulous quilt this could make, using the shapes and star positions. have to give it a think!

@gregoryshipley4637 3 года назад

Had never done a star battle before, watched a few mins to grasp the logic then loved working through the solve myself, such a fun puzzle type.

@rickwoods5274 3 года назад

I solved the memory problem you run into at 20:35 by reserving red and blue for 2x2s, and using green and orange for the long 1-wide strips that contain 1 star (I use gray for the sky rather than green). Any time I'm dealing with multiple green or orange cells in the same row or column, there's 1 star across all of them, even if they're disconnected.

@AviDrissman 3 года назад

I reserve colors for regions containing a star. For stars I use a normal “8” and for non-stars I use a center “1”. It’s so much better than doing color differentiation.

@Frie_Jemi 3 года назад

Gonzo, although Gonzo is referred to as a monster rather than a bird, his long-hooked nose was referenced as a beak throughout the Muppet show. Interestingly though, he did have a long-standing relationship with Camilla the chicken, and he self-identified himself as a "whatever"...

@mrkitewine7700 3 года назад

I loved this, more of these puzzles please.

@readersrock101 3 года назад

im just impressed at his abilities to see the regions at all...i’m so blind i cant even tell where the boundaries are

@NiennaNeryam 3 года назад

First time seeing this kind of puzzle, thoroughly enjoyed it!

@thefallenarm589 3 года назад

Thank you for the puzzle and explanation ; harder was to start, after you explained the 2x2 tricks, it was way easier but still challenging. Really enjoyed this one

@josephrion3514 2 года назад

I think you might like it because it does the row column region thing sudoku does. There is lots of satisfying logic in it. Anti king's move.

@freddyflares2757 3 года назад

Good stuff. I'd never have got past that bit in the middle with the 3 regions without sneaking a peek at the video.

@bibliopolist 3 года назад

Nice puzzle, but the region borders were not visible at all when I watched this on my TV, so I had to go back to the desktop PC. Even here the highlighting made it very hard to follow the solve. As so many have already asked you, please do use the hightlighting method that does not reinforce the borders whenever you do a puzzle with irregular regions. Thanks!

@couchalmark675 3 года назад

I found a useful method with some regions was to use the 2x2 division method in each of the four possible tessellations and see if there was one where one of the 2x2s only occupied one box of the region. This happens in Gonzo near the end, for instance.

@natalieblayney603 3 года назад

First time seeing a puzzle like this.. looks like a lot of fun!!

@wehavethemegapixels 3 года назад

Big man Simon giving a shout out to my tube station 🙌🏻

@321Yappie 3 года назад

That was enjoyable to watch as always! The region borders were hard to distinguish from the normal lines.. But the logic and the puzzle type is amazing. I had to comment, because of the title. I hope the puzzle will not become me. :D

@markp7262 3 года назад

One thing I noticed right away was the fact that the outside consists of only 3 regions. Since there are 4 separate row/columns (r1/r18/c1/c18) requiring 3 stars each, and only 9 available stars in the regions, there must be three points of overlap (i.e. stars in corners). When the upper right corner is eliminated, that means that all three other corners are stars. (I'm posting this @8:01 of the video, so I'll see if he spots this at some later point.) Yep, took him less than 30 seconds. :-D 29:38 finish.

@edgarfan317 3 года назад

Love starbattles, the break is always welcome even when it is only separating good puzzles from other good puzzles.

@ldamoff 3 года назад

That was a new one for me, i've never done one of those before but that was very fun!

@kelzling 3 года назад

A puzzle that's all about colouring, perfect!

@richalsop 3 года назад

I literally downloaded a star puzzle app this morning and thought, I'd love to see Simon or Mark tackle a monster one!

@andrewgrant6516 3 года назад

And maybe afterwards they could do a star battle. More tea, vicar?

@bobbie0976 3 года назад

These are always fun distractions! Got stuck twice but refused to give up and finally cracked it

@DarrenNakamura 3 года назад

I needed a little push at the beginning, and it still took me 3 hours, but I got it. more Star Battle on the channel, please!

@lancemc9298 3 года назад

Love the Starbattles! I think a Starbattle app would be very cool.

@Quickliverus 3 года назад

I just completed this very nice puzzle. Quickly going to the end of your video to check the results I found that we used the same colours! Quite funny that.

@MrAbdullahShariff 3 года назад

29:10 "I'm just having a stare, just to see if I see anything really obvious”... As he moves the mouse away from the star which wasn't surrounded 🙄🙄🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

@kilimanjarocruz660 3 года назад

I'm not particularly good at Starbattles, so this one tooke me 1:08, but I am pleased to have solved it. I'm looking forward to seeing where your solvepath diverges from mine.

@redsox2722 3 года назад

Brilliant Simon!

@aaronfuzion 3 года назад

Didn't the muppets basically make a whole movie about no one knowing what gonzo is including himself?

@ericpraline1302 3 года назад

This is possibly the best name of any puzzle on CTC.

@rickwyckoff291 3 года назад

I really like these puzzles :)

@pmonk1487 3 года назад

I know this is odd, but I find it hard to differentiate the purple and green when near each other. I'm moderately tritanomalous. And before someone comments, yes my avatar does have purple and green. He is a poor monkey ninja who doesn't realize he isn't hiding. (Though the particular hues in my avatar look yellow (green) and grey (purple) when I am tired.) Edit: Grammar and clarification

@kaldeathar3462 3 года назад

I would totally watch Simon tackle an 18x18 sudoku :)

@yichen6313 3 года назад

Very nice puzzle! Good to have a change from the usual 9x9 grid

@phs125 3 года назад

Took me more than 90 minutes with help. It's 1:43am here. Totally worth losing my sleep...

@seanmcdonough6221 3 года назад

Enjoyed the video. I do have a request for future videos however. I know it's not always possible because the coloring can get fairly complex but when able to could you refrain from using yellow next to green and blue next to purple. I'm partially color blind and while I can tell the blue and purple apart just barely the green and yellow look exactly the same to me. I know you have a lot going on when solving these so understand if it gets forgotten or not able to with how complex some of the solves are but when possible it would be greatly appreciated.

@lewsouth1539 3 года назад

[30:17] Simon observes that c1-2 need 2 more stars, but somehow fails to notice that c2 needs 1, and there is only 1 place to put it! That is bizarre.

@charlottestang9462 3 года назад

woah... Simon diverges from his traditional red star colouring. I knew he liked purple, but this is a new level

@RichSmith77 3 года назад

I know, right. Who is this imposter and what's he done with the real Simon? "Maybe I'm missing something obvious"...oh, okay. It's the real Simon after all.

@thefallenarm589 3 года назад

30:33 also there's only one free space on column 2, sometimes missing the simplest rule :D ; also this doesn't come enough in the comments, you're brilliant

@IllidanMaster07 3 года назад

Hi ! I downloaded your sudoku app a couple months ago, and I just finished it today ! It was a lot of fun cracking theses puzzles in my spare time. Do you have an idea when there will be some more puzzles available ? Thanks for answering !

@Coyotek4 3 года назад

This one beat me. I got to about the 12:43 point of the video on my own, missed a couple 'obvious' moves, and completely missed the 'three region' strategy Simon used to zero in on eight stars. Clearly, I have much to learn with regard to 'Star Battle' puzzles.

@LednacekZ 3 года назад

I dont like to solve starbattle puzzles, but I like watching you do them.

@kwombok 3 года назад

Starbattle is such an incredibly cool name for this type of puzzle.

@RenanLeandroFerreira 3 года назад

Loved this kind of puzzle! Where do i get more?

@andrewgrant6516 3 года назад

Star maker! Dream taker! Soul breaker! I'm so happy now.

@robertomelo1461 3 года назад

Waiting for the launch of the app with that type of puzzle

@TheFrozenfish 3 года назад

Someone should count how many times Simon said the word "star" in this video.

@emisor9272 3 года назад

29:10 just having a stare to see if i can see anything obvious... * completely misses red mark seen by a star right next to the mouse pointer *

@atomicsushi1 3 года назад

Me at the start of the puzzle: I wonder why Simon didn't use yellow for the stars?? That's what I'll do. Me at the end of the puzzle: #$!%@ is that a star or a highlighted cell?? Great puzzle as always!

@pairot01 3 года назад

18:49 You could have also coloured that region differently so that the top 3 squares are one region, the full 4 squares underneath are a second region, and the sole bottom square is the third region meaning there's a star in that square. Is this a flaw of the strategy or do we actually know there's a star on both the top and bottom squares by using the strategy twice?

@djhammond82 3 года назад

more star battle please!

@RichSmith77 3 года назад

30:17 Simpler to just ask where the last star in c2 can go. 😂

@theappealtoheaven 3 года назад

more starbattle and slytherlink and double choco and hotaru beam puzzles!

@robertodiurno 3 года назад

could you make the colors more different from each other? us colorblind crowd really struggle to see, especially when you use green and yellow next to each other. or green and red, blue and purple, etc.

@Vallam23 3 года назад

Are the green and red difficult for you to tell apart in this software? I can't tell the yellow from green or the blue from purple at all, but the red seems to be a completely different shade so it doesn't look at all like the lighter green/yellow

@sheldonjensen7957 3 года назад

Being blue-purple colorblind really disadvantages someone...oh well. Its the life I live

@sheldonjensen7957 3 года назад

I also cannot see the difference between the yellow and green with the smaller squares in this puzzle. RIP Me

@michaelhoffman2011 3 года назад

Well that was a doozy... 100 mins... and finished. Great puzzle

@TheTruth-xp2of 3 года назад

Watched it up to around 11 minutes. Just can't tell the difference between the yellow and green used in this software.

@pelahnar4 2 года назад

The stars in the final position kind of look like the horsehead nebula. If you squint. I wonder if that was on purpose, and what the title was referring to.

@edomaguaiota899 3 года назад

hey simon the new app is great saves the last state but, the timer resets, can u make it to also save the timer?

@Moker49 3 года назад

loved it

@lukostello 3 года назад

at 18:53 Seems he could have divided that up differently such that the deduction is the one on the button must be the star

@MichaelJ-lo7mz 3 года назад

YAY MORE STARBATTLE!!!!!!!!!!

@mikepictor 3 года назад

I twitch every time you move your mouse off to the side to mark a colour, considering your colour menu responds to the key pad (4 for green, 7 for red, etc..) 😀

@Darkstar2342 3 года назад

Your colors are pretty hard to tell apart for colorblind people. Blue/Purple and Yellow/Green is tricky for protanopes for example, you should make sure they get a bit more discernable through their lightness (i.e. make one of each darker or even lighter)