Hi Simon, thanks again for a wonderful feature. In case you couldn't guess, this was tremendous fun to work on with Michael, who is firmly one of my favourite constructors since he came on the scene only a few months ago. We have been chatting quite a bit and I was delighted when he showed me his concept for a Parroty Line puzzle, and asked if I fancied helping, saying that he liked my choice of line placements in my puzzles. Lovely to get a compliment like that from someone whose skills I admire so much. I loved the simple yet original concept, and the silliness of it, and jumped at the chance. The puzzle itself came together fairly quickly. Michael was keen to have the 1/3 parrot pair and the 2/6 parrot on the left resolved by the 6 parrot above. I thought of the idea of the opening involving the roping happening one of two ways, depending on if the cockatiel is a 3 or a 9. Thought that was quite nice and was a natural next step which followed on well from Michael's line made of 2 letter words. The roping turned out to be pivotal all the way through the solve. We knew that the rule itself wasn't powerful enough to populate the grid with many digits (only the digits on parrots have any meaning, the words could be anything.) So we knew we would need another clue type, and we wanted to make it thematic and silly. I thought it would be funny to reinvent what a cage meant in a sudoku, and Michael thought of adding the tags to make them basically into an arrow in fancy dress as a bird cage. We shifted things round a bit but it wasn't long before we found a finished grid which had a pleasing solve path with lots of steps we liked, even though some of them are pretty hard to spot and there's a lot going on. When testing our puzzle we both kept forgetting some of the steps, and getting stuck on our own puzzle 😅 The most fun part was making the aesthetics. We both learnt a few new skills in order to get the artwork into this. Sudoku Maker is such a fabulous bit of software for aesthetic possibilities, it's very inspiring and exciting. I even had a very niche video call with Nordy where he explained how I could draw a half-circle in Sudoku Maker (which I needed for the arched tops of the bird cages) - a tip which he recently learned himself from gdc when he made his excellent puzzle 'Bubbles'. Thanks Nordy! But yes mostly thanks Michael for the awesome concept and letting me help bring it to life, and to Simon for choosing to show our puzzle and enjoying its silliness in the spirit that was intended. 🦜 PS: loved the title and thumbnail. i was actually on Pointless in 2019 - and we won the jackpot by naming an obscure Christopher Lloyd film... Clue!
This was a deeply beautiful puzzle, and reading about how the logic and artwork played off one another is fascinating. Thank you for bringing this puzzle to be, and for this lovely explanation!
Funny puzzle idea, but not a fun puzzle, for me at least. I guess it's just too much for me with all the lettering etc. Might return to it another day though, and change my mind. I did enjoy your story about how the puzzle was made, and also thanks for making me aware of Sudoku Maker. I will have to give it a go. Edit: I did enjoy the parts of the puzzle I could do, but that was just the parrots really.
As far as I can tell (top to bottom, left to right): Cockatoo, cockatiel, red-winged parrot, estern rosella, blue-and-yellow macaw, lilian's lovebird, scarlet macaw
Hi Simon (and everyone else), Eddie's mum here 😺. Thank you so much for sharing his fund and on such an amazing video. Roping is always one of my favorite ways of solving which is only slightly behind colouring the entire grid. Thank you to everyone who has supported Eddie. He's doing really well and will hopefully be out of hospital tomorrow and can watch tomorrows videos. He'll have to catch up on this one so he can see himself on the big screen. Thank you again for sharing his story. I honestly can't believe something so awful could happen to such a sweet boy.
It's strange to me that Simon is such an advocate for using center marks and corner marks to differentiate cell logic from box logic with actual numbers but then almost never uses anything but corner marks when it comes to letters...
I suspect he would have just used colors were it not for the roping in the bottom of this puzzle. I probably would have used various shades of gray for the roping and colors instead of letters.
Hundred per cent with you on this one. Normally I multitask to CtC but when I see those setter's names I turn off the work monitor and settle in for the ride lol
There have been a few featured on this channel, I think one was included in the Patreon puzzle pack recently that was themed around negative constraints.
116:20 As magnificent as you would expect from these two. I got myself in a terrible muddle with a poor choice of colouring and finally realised I had broken the world just over an hour into the solve and had to restart from scratch. Lettering proved much easier to follow the second time around, but still had a devil of a time working through some of the cunning tricks held in this one. This was such a joy though, that the slow time and complete blow-up never detracted on bit from the pleasure of working on this puzzle.
Yes - lorikeet us a type of parrot - and my lorikeet is listening to you solve the puzzle and commenting.... She was very excited when you said lorikeet!
40:44 -- It wasn't actually from nowhere. Evidence shows you stumbled upon the neat little trick called sudoku that can occasionally be used in these kinds of puzzles. :p
In a puzzle with parrots and letters used for pencil marks, there was a point around the 27:30 mark where Simon was having a talk with us about the birds and the b’s.
This is hilarious. I just discovered/started watching Pointless on RU-vid in the last week. Talk about timing. The opening picture totally had me. Time to watch the solve (a few days late)
My wife is generally not so interested in your videos as I am, but she's found something she can enjoy in this one, as a bird lover. R1C2 is a cockatoo, both caged birds are probably love birds, R4C4 is a cockatiel, R5C5 is a sun conure and both birds in column 8 are macaws.
It doesn't help when he uses those very dark shades of green and blue that basically obliterate anything else in the cells. (For a long time, I was wondering why he didn't use the 4 pencil-marked in r7c8 ... then I realised that it broke box 6 ... then I realised that there were also 4s pencil marked in r7c7 and r7c9 but I just couldn't see them against an almost identical colour of cell shading...)
This was a genuine delight to watch Simon geek out over parrots. I literally laughed out loud when he said "I wonder if I'm meant to know the names of these different types of parrots." 🤣
I finished in 119 minutes. This one was quite enjoyable. It took me some time to find that the top left bird was a naked single. From there, everything flowed very well with great logic. Cool ruleset. Great Puzzle!
Someone is going to be making a Puccini Sudoku (in fairness Pucchini did write variations on a theme ). Sudoku also featured in "Winning Combination" today (I think a repeat)
I patiently waited for over an hour to hear Simon's parrot voice and began to think that the closest we would get was the 7 flub at 61 minutes. The solve message did not disappoint and was brilliantly performed sir! 😄
I believe I spot a Norwegian Blue parrot in the puzzle; they are known for their beautiful plumage, needing to rest after a prolonged squawk, and for pining for the fjords.
Haven't watched the whole video yet, but I will be donating to help this cat tomorow, after I get paid. I can't believe someone would do that to a cat, and I really hope the goal is met.
48m49s. It took me way longer than I wish it had to realize that the 9 parrot meant that boxes 7, 8, and 9 had the same rows, just permuted, which was a breakthrough I needed for a long time
At about 31:00 you can limit U & V down to the top right two cells. Solving for possible digits for U&V you can narrow this down to a 258 triple. Seemed to be a much quicker way in from there on.
Seems a risky question for Pointless to ask. By the time they aired the show, there was always the possibility Puccini Sudoku and Jeremy Sudoku would have been created. I'll give it a week before each appears on LMD.
They sometimes mutter about all answers being correct as of . So it doesn't matter if the answers change before the programme is aired just as long as they got them right at the time they recorded the show.
@@DuncanBooth True. I wasn't really being serious. It was more an attempt at pointing out the incredible creativity and imagination of the setters that are regularly featured on CtC. Heck, they probably had to check LMD on the day of recording. 😂
So we, a collection of nerds, Together solved parrots and words And we did it with glee In a minute and three Still I say this is one for the birds. And now the puzzle is pining for the fjords.
Parrots for me are: Parrot (papagaio) Cockatoo (cacatua) Cockatiel (calopsita) [Both super cute names in English] And the famous one from the movie Rio: Blue arara (arara azul) I find this puzzle very cute!! 🤗
Maybe this line type could be called a "Uniqueness Line". Make it look like a thermometer of a different color and have the rules say "That the bulb of a Uniqueness Line gives how many unique digits are allowed to be on the line and repeated digits must repeat in a set pattern."
I should know all these types of parrots. I see them flying around here every day! And the cockatoo should be saying a 4 letter word based on every cockatoo I’ve ever met. They’re all very naughty.
Not super easy, but solvable. Coloring definitely helped me with the solve, as did (possible spoiler, but not really...) having the 9 cell parrot which led me to use the letter tool. The opening is very easy, imo, but then you get to a point where you know a lot, but I became stuck. Took me a while to find the logic to proceed, but once I did, it flowed nicely again. Now to watch you have some fun. :)
I saw the roping, but because I used lettering for the long parrot clue instead of coloring the ropes, I missed out on the roping color (blue in the video) for box 5 which probably would have cut my 90 minute solve time in half (or at least knocked 15 to 20 minutes off). My coloring was done just for the lower left parrot and the upper right parrot. Also, because of not seeing the roping clue, I had to use the upper left parrot a bit more than you did as it forced a few options out of column 4 lower down due to my having known of the set of digits at that point in my solve. Still cool to see I saw most of the intended logic. Thanks for the video!
@@martysears Sorry for the confusion, but my name isn't Jay. I've had this username since the 90s, but only recently have I been having to correct this slight confusion. I'm nowhere near the genius. I do enjoy logic problems and solving these, and while I have set a few, none have been featured (probably due to the lower quality setting). In fact, I've been struggling with his latest and only just found the break through and it is still slow going for me at almost 90 minutes. Admittedly I didn't appreciate his break in until almost 60 minutes into the solve, so maybe 30 minutes of productive solving isn't too bad, but I've yet to put a single digit in the puzzle. Spoiler for Jay's puzzle ahead. -- Just have a bunch of the cage sums noted as being either A, B, C, or D after realizing his puzzle hinges on noting the four sets of 1-9 with 34 cells and no repeat digits in each set meaning that 2 digits go unused from the total of the four sets, but which two, and from which one or two sets I've yet to determine. Back to it. Thanks again for the kind words on this puzzle and sorry for the confusion.
I know it's artistic but sometimes i wish there were a plain version with more standard markings available -- especially in one like this where i used coloring to solve and the art made it harder to visualize everything because it covered things up. I think otherwise I would have liked this puzzle more
l like the concept behind the puzzle, but l wouldve appreciated a more "pure syntax" version of this puzzle,, as it is right now l have a hard time actually trying to solve the puzzle because of all the cosmetical stuff. It's especially difficult to properly color the white lines with how big they are and the way every cell is already colored in. l'm not saying this version shouldnt be the main one, but a secondary easier-to-digest version wouldve been nice :]
